.Edu.Co.Blog

This is the third year I'm sending out a Holiday message. This time is very especial, though, because 2009 was a turning point in many ways. I got the chance to meet amazing people from all around the world, and to enjoy their hospitality, which in itself was a humbling event.

So I want to say "Thank you" to all of you, for all the learning you've made possible, and for helping me to make true so many personal and professional dreams.

May 2010 be a time to ask ourselves what would happen if we're wrong, and to rethink (from there) the things we do, so we can change our world in a positive way.

As usual, this is a small "homemade" message. A short video, including some quotes and ideas important to me:

Thank you everyone for making 2009 a year even more memorable than the previous one! Here's to a 2010 full of great surprises for each and every one of you!

Happy Holidays!

A excepción de que se indique lo contrario, este contenido está publicado bajo una licencia Creative Commons.

(Disclaimer: Please be patient with my English. I'm open to suggestions for improvement )

Last week, the Ministry of Education of Colombia held the National Forum on the Pertinence of Education. This is an annual event focused on a different area each year. Given that 2009 was declared the "Year of education for innovation and competitiveness", there was a discussion around things that make education pertinent, and an interest in presenting innovative experiences.

As part of this event, I wanted to organize a TEDx session, but as it turned out, TED requires TEDx events to be independent from any other event. This is unfortunate (and I really think it must be reconsidered), because in many places (at least, in our case) the purpose is not to use TED's brand to get people to come to some event (on its own, our Forum congregates over 1500 teachers from all over the country), but to spread ideas included in TEDTalks. So, bottom line, I can't use the TEDx name, even if I'm using TEDTalks and I want to recognize that.

This situation (and a look to the Forum agenda) made me think about the need to give participants a place to talk about what was being discussed at the Forum. There were a lot of presentations, expert panels, and not enough time to bring those discussions to the context of every person. So I decided to change my approach.

My initial idea around the TEDx session was to have 2-3 sessions, 1.5 hours each. I wanted to have local presenters and several TEDTalks per session, related to global issues. However, most TEDx events are based on an auditorium format, which is not very useful for discussion. Happily, I could take advantage of a large space we would be using during the Forum to do an EduCamp workshop, so I decided to put more focus on conversation and less on presentation.

Enter the World Café, which ideas I had use in the past. Our new design included two sessions: The first one called Reboot and the second, Engage (which, by the way, were the names of the first and last sessions of TED2009).

The first session was devoted to think about the way global issues reflect on our context, and to try and find the critical issues at hand. As a conversation starter, we used talks by Al Gore, Charles Moore and Arthur Benjamin. Because of the setting, we decided to limit the time of talks, because it would be quite difficult to capture people's attention for too long. So all the talks would not last more than 20 minutes. After this, we had a one-hour Café session, with 3 rounds.

The second session was devoted to explore concrete ideas/actions that each participant could develop in her own environment, in order to address local effects of global issues. Once again, a TEDTalk (this time by Seth Godin) was used as a conversation starter. Once again, we had a 3-round session.

During each conversation, we had music from different sources playing in the background: TEDTalks, Playing for change (I still have doubts about if it's even legal to play from YouTube) and Kutiman. I mentioned the last two were an example of new and creative ways to create collaboration between people who never met before.

Each participant received a "program" including the different talks and music we would be using, which she could use also to write down the contact info of other participants.

At the end of the session, we reminded everyone that the talks available online and the World Café ideas could be used by them to do these kind of sessions in their own institutions.

Some bad things:

• The time: The session was scheduled on day 2 of the Forum, at 4:00p.m. I think it would had been better on the last day (which was not possible for reasons beyond my control), and earlier in the afternoon. 4:00 was too late for a lot of people and, even worse, there was a delay in the whole event, which meant we started around 4:45. In the end, there were not as many people as we expected (we were expecting 200, 97 arrived). Because of this, some part of the space felt empty.
• The weather: There has been a lot of rain in Bogotá in these days. Last Wednesday was no exception. Around 5:30, it started to rain and the temperature went down. The spacious setting is way too open, so it was really (really) cold for a lot of us. Even with coffee, the rain (and the huge traffic jams that it creates in the city) helped to reduce the amount of people at the end, which at the same time made very difficult to get a good closure.
• Because we had to change the name of the session (we moved to the name EduCafé at last minute), there was a "communication failure", I'd say. It was not that easy to communicate the purpose of the session to some people...

Some interesting things:

• In my experience, I've found that many teachers, when given paper and markers, decide that they are supposed to use the paper to write. Not to draw or doodle, but to write in a clean and organized way. This happens even when they're told about the purpose of the paper on the tables. I wonder if this reflects the way they use those tools in their environments; if so, it's a reason of concern that we have such a strong beliefs about what it means to put thoughts on paper. I had to remind some of them, every now and then, that they were not meant to create organized lists, but to draw and connect ideas. I wonder if we just have a hard time trying to register our ideas visually (and we had no graphic recorder).
• There were some groups (especially one from the Atlantic shore) which had a hard time splitting up. They arrived together (later, also), and it was very difficult to get them to join other tables. I wonder if the group turns into some kind of "safety net", in this case.
• Because of the selected talks, some people concluded that the session had to do with environmental education, even though they were supposed to know in advance about what we would be doing. This was not a problem, though, because this served as a starting point for other kind of discussions.

Some good things:

• The environment was fantastic. I just loved what our support staff did with it, because the first time I saw it, it felt quite gray, quite cold. We even had flowers on each table!
• The conversations were very interesting. I was really happy to see how excited people was about having the chance to finally speak to each other (like I said, this year the event was way too formal), and it was great to see some of the things that came up in the tables.
• TEDTalks are a great discussion starter. Obviously, it depends on the talks you select, but in this case, even some of the staff guys were asking about the talks, which was unexpected. Even though they didn't participate in the discussions, they were engaged enough as to take with them several programs, after we finished.
• At the end of the session, a lot of people expressed their satisfaction with it. For some of them, it was something that helped "to break the mold" of the Forum. We are convinced that, if we had started at, let's say, 2:00p.m, we would have had more people and a richer conversation.

More pictures of this EduCafé:

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

And the slides I used during the session:

I guess we'll have to wait a little bit to see what happens after this, but I'd say it was a very good beginning. I felt sort of like when we did our first EduCamp. A lot of things to improve, a lot of lessons learned and, hopefully, an excuse for people to bring new conversations to their environments. I have to say I just loved the experience!

This week, we’ll have our Annual National Forum on Education, organized by the Colombian Ministry of Education. This year, the main theme is the pertinence of education, given that 2009 was declared the year of education for innovation and competitiveness.

As part of my small contribution to this event, I wanted to collect some ideas from people attending the Open Education Conference, and in fact, going around with a camera asking a few questions was one of my purposes there. It was a great opportunity to get some thoughts about a couple of questions: First, is education relevant? Second: If so, how can we make it more relevant?

Clearly, those were ambiguous questions, but that was the idea: To try and get some insight on the views of different people about this, starting with an ill-formed question .
The short time allowed for just eight people to answer this question in OpenEd. Here are those eight answers. As you will see, there are very different approaches to the same thing, but I’d say the whole picture gives a great view of a challenging issue. So, there you go (in the order they were recorded):

Brian Lamb

Sylvia Currie

Gardner Campbell

Leigh Blackall

D'arcy Norman

David Wiley

Stephen Downes

Tony Bates

I have to say there are a lot of people I didn’t get to talk with (the first names in my head are Scott Leslie, Chris Lott, Alec Couros, Dave Cormier, George Siemens, for example), but I would be glad to include here any new ideas about this, and about where that lead us.

Right now I'm in the middle of translating all of this (via DotSub) to Spanish, but I'm having a hard time to get what Leigh says at 1:23-1:28. Any help will be appreciated. UPDATE: Thanks to Gardner for helping with "rhetoric"!

Thanks to each and every one of you, who accepted to answer this question out of the blue!

Like always, I'm having a hard time making myself to write in English, even though I know how important it is, especially after OpenEd.

This post is meant to talk about the first Spanish Open Course that I get to offer (actually it's the first one, no matter the language ), which came from an invitation by University of La Sabana, in Bogotá. They contacted me a few months ago, inviting me to do a course on their master on educational informatics program. I accepted on one condition: It would have to be open.

So here I am, a few months later, after thinking a lot about its design and discussing it with a few people (I *really* need to learn about creating/designing in public), and obviously getting ideas from the work of people like David Wiley, Alec Couros, George Siemens & Stephen Downes and Leigh Blackall.

The course already have 14 for-credit participants, and about 20 more participants taking it without certification. We have people from Spain, El Salvador, Mexico, Peru and, obviously, most of the participants are from Colombia.

For now, I'll talk about the technology I'm using, because I think maybe it could be useful to someone, and also it would be great to get feedback on it. There are two things I wanted to achieve with technology: First, I wanted to do something that could be replicated by each participant (which means only non-paid tools and no hosting); second, I wanted to facilitate access to people who are heavy e-mail users. Also, no walled gardens but a public approach (bye bye Moodle), trying to get participants to work on their own personal learning environments throughout the course.

So this is a view of the things I'm using. Detailed info below:

Participants are asked to create a blog on any available service. It is suggested to find for ways to do e-mail publishing, so they don't have to go to any website or use any additional tool.

Once the participant has a blog, she has to register it in the course wiki, which has a Google Docs form embedded. They have to include in their registration the RSS feed for their blog.

The GDocs document is then plugged into Yahoo Pipes via a CSV output. The pipe gets all the feeds and create one single feed, which I'm sending to Feedburner. I'm using Feedburner, actually, to create the possibility of an e-mail subscription, and obviously, to get a little control over subscription statistics.

This way, participants think about RSS aggregators only if they want to. They can have an e-mail subscription, which sends a daily message with a compilation of the posts compiled by the pipe during the previous day.

I'm getting the final RSS feed and I send it to twitter via twitterfeed. There's an user (elrn09) which publishes this feed and also the things compiled in a Diigo group created for the course.

There's also a Google group created, which is not being very popular at the time. I kind of understand this, because participants are not necessarily heavy Internet users, so even creating a blog can seem a daunting task for some of them.

Some interesting thing about this:

• The pipe (a very simple one, actually) can get input from any set of RSS feeds (For example, I thought at some point about asking people to get Google Reader accounts and then sharing the posts they found interesting. I could get all the RSS feeds from those Shared items pages, and change the pipe to find the "most read" items in the course. Of course, this faces the problem of getting valuable items lost if they are not shared enough times. In the end, I decided it would be a new layer of complexity for most participants, so I forgot about it)
• After setting up their blog and subscribing to the feedburner feed, people can go back to use the tools they're used to (I'm guessing e-mail is a weapon of choice for most of the participants), both to publish and consume information from the course.
• I "cloned" the whole set-up for another course I was starting, and it was a reasonably quick process. So it is easily replicable.

Some limitations, and things that I'm still trying to figure out:

• How do I analyze all the data coming out of the course? If I wanted to see the progress/evolution of different participants, what kind of tools should I use? Is it possible to do it with the pipe I have now?
• Feedburner is not flexible enough with the mail subscriptions. I'd like every participant to decide whether she gets a daily or real time notification.
• I can't do something like the CCK09 Daily, where some items get to be commented before reaching the participants. That would be nice.

So far, so good. During the first week, I had to keep looking at the feeds that were registered, because some participants would write their blog URL, not the feed URL. Also, some of them registered feeds from existing blogs, so I had to suggest them to label their posts, in order to retrieve just those entries. To "keep clean" the feed, I had to go every now and then and update the source for the pipe, extending the cell range to include the URLs that had been verified already. Some maintenance work that can't be avoided, I guess.

But after that, everything works perfectly. I guess a OPML file could be generated (and it would help later with analytics, definitely), but so far is something I don't think participants are really needing...

Anyway, I have to confess that I still need to understand much better the way Pipes works. I feel that I'm missing a lot of interesting things that could be done, because of my limited knowledge. However, I'm happy because it looks like it works!

Later, some thoughts about the way the course goes. Definitely, there are a lot of limitations created by our context, and the level of actual use of several technologies that seem common-place in other countries. I'll get to learn a lot about what's possible and what kind of things can be done to make these kind of experiences good learning opportunities.

We'll see how it goes!

The Open Education Conference sponsors made available three travel scholarships for people attending this year's conference. The requirement to apply is to write a blog post answering two questions, so I guess that's a very good excuse to write again in this blog, that has been a little abandoned in the last semester (mostly because I do prefer writing in Spanish, obviously).
 
Anyway, these are the questions:
 

1. What you would “bring” to the conference? What can you contribute?
    
   Well, I have an already accepted proposal, so based on that I'll say that my contribution is the story of an experiment that we have done with about 700 higher education teachers, that has started to go mildly viral . The interesting thing about this experience is that it goes beyond the mere discourse about Learning Objects or OER, exposing participants to a connected/connective learning experience. I'd say it can be a valuable demonstration (that, of course, we expect to improve with the feedback from the attendees) of how can we 'walk the talk' regarding the use of technology in our daily practice.
    
   Something else: In the past, I've had some experience reporting events like this in Spanish, so that's something else I will do during the conference. You can expect me to provide information related to OpenEd to the Spanish-speaking community, both via Twitter and my blog. I also expect to be around with a video camera, asking participants about their thoughts on the pertinence of education. That's the general subject of a national forum that the Colombian Ministry of Education will have in October, so I intend to collect and publish online the ideas and thoughts of people around the world, to enrich our own perspective on this critical issue.
    
   I think of myself as sort of a "bridge builder"... I'm convinced of the importance of helping non-English speakers to get access to many current discussions that have a huge impact on the way we think about learning and the role of education, so I think that attending OpenEd will be, for me, a good opportunity to help bringing a lot of different and interesting ideas to an educational community that can make good use of them.  
 

2. What you see as the most critical issue facing you in your efforts around Open Education, and how you think the conference can help you address it?
    
   This has to do with something else that I'll definitely bring to the conference: lots of questions. The OER / Open Education movement is just starting in my country, and there are a lot of issues that we'll be able to address through the participation in this conference. For example, since 2006, we have a national work in progress around LO (that I helped to design), so we are facing the usual problems related to sharing resources among institutions, and how to use them in an effective way in teacher's practices. I think OpenEd will a good opportunity to enrich our current approach to this subject.

   Now, on the other hand, I think Open Education (in general) has a huge potential to improve the way we think about both teaching and formal education. I believe that the possibility of getting first-hand knowledge about the issues faced by institutions and new initiatives around the world could be useful to build a strong case for Open Education in a country like Colombia, helping us to go beyond the mere content approach, to explore the political and economical issues involved.

   Finally, it won't be fair to end this without saying that going to OpenEd is, clearly, a fantastic opportunity to meet a lot of people that I have read over the years, who have helped me change the way I see the world. I'll be really honored to be there.

So, that's it. That's my reflection about the things I can bring to OpenEd, and the things I expect to learn about. I hope it makes some sense…!