blog.puntopanto, bloggers she wrote

Philipp Schmidt (of the Peer 2 Peer University), today send to the Mozilla Open Education list, this announce for a new initiative, sponsored by Mozilla and with support of the MacArthur Foundation, that I am pleased to share

Help turn the open Web into a rich learning environment and explore new possibilities for using Firefox add-ons to support learning online, as part of the the Jetpack for Learning Design Challenge sponsored by the Mozilla Foundation with support from the MacArthur Foundation. Designers, educators and software developers who want to turn their innovative ideas into working prototypes will learn to use the new Jetpack technology from Mozilla Labs to create Firefox add-ons to support learning on the open Web, using standard web technologies like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. The creators of the most promising add-ons will be invited to an intensive three-day Jetpack for Learning Design Camp (to be held in conjunction with SXSW Interactive in March 2010), where they’ll further refine their work and the best add-ons will be publicly recognized.

For more information:

URL: http://design-challenge.mozilla.org/jetpack-for-learning
TWITTER: @jet4learning / #jet4learning

On last July, I got an email from Solana Larsen of GlobalVoicesOnline announcing a collaboration with a Danish Aid Organization: she was asking for someone interested to mentor a Danish or African blogging student participating on a course about using socialmedia for activism.

The course is started on 7th, September and the mentor team is composed by 30 bloggers from all around the world from the GlobalVoice Community: now we are trying to get in touch and starting a conversation with the 30 students in Copenhagen.

The course is focused on Climate Change and Climate Justice: the students will get the task to develop and carry out a large scale campaign on climate justice, brining the plight of the poor to the table of the COP15 summit in Copenhagen in December.
The students just made their first posts and started an email exchange with us.

As usual, any idea, iniative or project carried out with Global Voices is exiciting, as we act really as a global community and also this time everything is shared through the mentors.. we are peer-to-peer mentoring also ourselves.

I will follow a young mentee, Martina Aloo Ooko, a second-year student in Sociology from Kenya for  the next six weeks: we already  exchanged some emails, I was very interested in knowing more about her and her  expectations in attending this course.

Following to this workshop in Brussels , the promoters of that meeting started this initiative addressed to influence EU Member States in adopting more openness and transparency: the idea is to write in a collaborative and collective way a manifesto to be presented, during the the EU ministerial conference on November 19-20, 2009 where they will define the main priorities of e-government in the next three years.

The manifesto about public service 2.0  is under construction and your help in rating/writing the manifesto is welcomed: http://mixedink.com/Eups20/Manifesto?a=c0R4MHTZ

For background information on this initiative see http://eups20.wordpresscom

In quality of member of the OER Unesco community, I am very happy to know about this publication from UNESCO.

The book brings together the background papers and reports from the first three years of activities in the community. From the press release:

Education systems today face two major challenges: expanding thereach of education and improving its quality. Traditional solutionswill not suffice, especially in the context of today’s knowledgeintensive societies.
Open Educational Resources offer one solution for extending
learning opportunities. The goal of the OER movement is to equalize access to knowledge worldwide through sharing online high quality content. Open Educational Resources are digitalized materials offered freely and openly for use and reuse in teaching, learning and research.
Since 2005, UNESCO has been at the forefront of building
awareness about this movement by facilitating an extended
conversation in cyberspace. A large and diverse international
community has come together to discuss the concept and potential of OER in a series of online forums.
The background papers and reports from the first three years of community activities are now available in print. Open Educational Resources: Conversations in Cyberspace provides an overview of the first steps of this exciting new development: it captures the conversations between
leaders of some of the first OER projects, and documents early debates on the issues that continue to challenge the movement. The publication will provide food for thought for all those intrigued by OER – its promise and its progress. Open Educational Resources: Conversations in Cyberspace is UNESCO’s first openly licensed publication – an indication of the commitment of the Organization to the sharing of knowledge and the free flow of ideas.

To access the free online edition, go to http://oerwiki.iiep-unesco.org/index.php?title=Open_Educational_Resources:_Conversations_in_Cyberspace.

The print edition can be purchased for 12 Euros at http://publishing.unesco.org/details.aspx?Code_Livre=4671.

The European Commissioner Reding wants European ecommerce take off: though 45% of European families got a broadband connection, there is stil much mistrust in buying online, mainly if the websites are based in foreign country.
Last May for this reason they launched the portal eYou, the guide to your rights online. But there is a small problem: the website is only in 4 languages: English, French, German and Bulgarian (?)
The small website is only a list of faqs pointing to some other links to different pages of the European DG, there is no interaction. All this operation seems to me a nonsense… if the goal was to approach people with no experience to increase their confidence in ecommerce and informing them about their rights and protections by the European laws, how do they think to reach them in this way?
I wondered if it could be possibile to help for the translation of the website in Italian.. on the webpage I couldn’t see any licensing information, but I see a “contact” link, so I sent an email, asking why only four language.

In a very short time (24h) a received a kind aswer: they point me to link explaining European policy about translation…so the website designed to broaden the basis of European e-consumer, would fall in this category: Specialised information (technical information, speeches, campaigns, calls for tender) and breaking news (”What’s new?”, press releases, events) is not necessarily published in all languages. The choice of languages depends on the target audience and in any case it’s not possible to translate the contents as EU got an own copyright and for translating it is necessary to ask the authorization to the appointed service.. and in the end the answer is signed by a service and not by a person.

This is a silly smal story, that remind me to…1) to the discussion insideGlobalVoices on the polyglot Internet (recommend reading: this essay by Zuckermann) and about cooperative translation projects, 2) to the matters of copyright of contents from public government, 3) to the financed project by the Commission to promote e-participation

Do you know Global Voices Online Advocacy? It’s one of the non profit projects affiliated to GlobalVoices Online, devote to sustain freedom of speech against censorship around the world. You can also follow them through Twitter – Advox.
Global Voices Advocacy keeps track of online censorship worldwide in daily posts, and maintains a map of web 2.0 censorship. There are also guides like Anoymous Blogging with Wordpress & Tor or Blogging for a Cause that many bloggers appreciate.
As fromFreedom House Italy was just rated as partly free :

Global Press Freedom Declines in Every Region; for First Time Israel, Italy and Hong Kong Lose Free Status. … Out of the 195 countries and territories covered in the study, 70 (36 percent) are rated Free, 61 (31 percent) are rated Partly Free and 64 (33 percent) are rated Not Free. This represents a modest decline from the 2008 survey in which 72 countries and territories were Free, 59 Partly Free and 64 Not Free. The new survey found that only 17 percent of the world’s population lives in countries that enjoy a Free press.

I vote for Global Voices Advocacy, because… 1) I support freedom of speech and a I am against the censorship and 2) I know people working for Global Voices Advocacy and I trust them.

This blog post is part of Zemanta’s “Blogging For a Cause” http://www.zemanta.com/bloggingforacause campaign to raise awareness and funds for worthy causes that bloggers care about.

We, as participant of the Mozilla course, are requested to produce a Blueprint as assignment.
Everyone is trying to think something useful for the educational community.

My proposal arise fromt the consideration of language barriers in the OER community: the english (and spanish, too) speaking people could access many educational resources, open or semi-open, but for italian language (and I suppose also for many other languages in the world) things are very different.
So, in my opinion the question is, how we can exploit the existing resources for making them available to K-12 students and teachers not-english-speaking?

My proposals are two:

1) define a Sitemap format also for elearning contents. In Italy most of educational agencies use Moodle, but learning contents are not accessible outside Moodle. Many Universities and Schools agree to freely distribute their contents, but as the contents are “buried” inside the LCMS they are not accessible and usable. It was a school teacher, Dario Zucchini, a friend of mine, to suggest me the idea of using Sitemap for making contents more findable even by the search engines.

2) build an open source platform, easily to install and customize (wordpress-like) that allows teachers to create living libraries of educational objects. You could say: there are so many sites already, do you know connexions? In my experience people want to own the repository and use it in their own language. So this platform should easily allow to describe the education resources:I think something like www.librarything.com does with books, in which it is possible to pick the description of the books from external libraries (as we could pick the description of the education resources from other repositories), it is possible to assess and “review” the educational units, and also to suggest similar education units.. and many other actions..

What do you think about “www.educationalthing.com”?

The discussion is going on on the list of the course also in a distributed way through twitter, the participants blogs, the wiki course.

We had some troubles with the webex solutions for the live conferences (only audio, slides and chat) so I discovered the Openvideoconference.

I discovered the Flatknowledge project, a wonderful idea of open source publishing: “Flat World would become a publisher—commission, edit, and peer review the books—but it would give its titles away free on the web. Students could order paper copies cheaply in color or black-and-white, and the site would sell a host of study aids and services. In addition, teachers could edit, delete, and remix textbooks so that the books precisely match the teacher’s approach to a course. “ and many other interesting things going on in the world, like the The Seneca Centre for Development of Open Technology: in which students work in connection with the most important open source institution, like the Mozilla foundation.

If you want to know more about project and resources discussed during the course, I am bookmarking everything on my del.icio.us profile with the tag “MozOpenEduCourse”

I was very happy that my application to theOpen Education promoted by the Mozilla Foundation, ccLearn and P2PU (Peer2Peer University) was accepted. The course content were organized in three areas: open license, open technology and open pedagogy.

It was requested to propose a project idea to participate to the course: at the end of course, we have to prepare a blueprint related to the proposed idea.
Here the list of participant: for each of us, a bref description and the proposed project.

We have our first introductory session on April 2nd: Philips Schmidt, the coordinator of the course and the other panelist, from Mozilla Foundation and Creative Commons, explained us the structure of the course and the objectives.

The discussion on the Google Group started before the live session: we are from the four corners of globe, we have different backgrounds and live and work in different context.. I like it very much, but it will be a great challenge to set up our groups and our projects withing the next 6 weeks.

My proposal is quite general and I have to work on it: I wish to create a repository for Emeritus that agree in licensing their works under Creative Commons…. What the barriers? Do we need new tools/platforms for this?

tag #MozOpenEdCourse

April 23 is UNESCO World Book Day – and just because the Global Voices team loves blogs, doesn’t mean we have forgotten other forms of the written word! In fact, because we think reading literature is such an enjoyable way to learn about another culture, we have a fun challenge for all Global Voices contributors and readers, and bloggers everywhere.

The Global Voices Book Challenge is as follows:

UPDATE: Tag your posts with #gvbook09 so we can find your posts.

If you would like to know what you should be reading from Vietnam, Bolivia, Mozambique or New Zealand, or any other country, just ask in the comments
here
Someone is sure to give you suggestions.

And if you have any recommendations for any must-read works from your own country, please leave a comment too.

Once you have read your book (and written a post!) let us know – we’d love to discover what you learned on your literary expedition.

Feel free to use the images above and below to spread the word of the Global Voices Book Challenge!