The 2011 Global Education Conference has just wrapped up and I’m already looking forward to next years conference. While I was only able to take part in 8 sessions over the course of the week I know I’ll be going back and viewing archived versions of some of the ones I missed. Being global there were sessions at 2 and 3 am and while I am motivated….knowing I could watch them afterwards made staying in bed a bit easier.

Of the sessions I attended five were outstanding and inspiring, two were ok and one was just disappointing. Pretty high ratio of outstanding to average, in my opinion and expereince with conferences. I don’t want to go into great detail about which ones I considered excellent, which were average…there’s no real benefit to be gained there. But I did want to capture some of the links that came up as a result of these sessions. So without too much fanfare, here’s a link list:

TakingITGlobal – not a new link for me but one that came up in several sessions connected to some very good work: http://www.tigweb.org/

The Centre fpr Global Education: http://tcge.tiged.org/

Global Youth Leadership Institute: http://gyli.org/index.php

research journalism initiative: http://www.researchjournalisminitiative.net/index.html

iEarn Collaboration Center: http://media.iearn.org/home

Adobe Youth Voices: http://www.youthvoices.adobe.com/

User Generated Education: http://usergeneratededucation.wordpress.com/

Listing of backchannel tools: http://www.shambles.net/pages/staff/BCtools/

#redeschat wiki: http://redeschat.wikispaces.com/

Tecnica learning exchange:

This is a cross-cultural program that connect North Americans, largely college students (at this p oint), with Nicaraguans for a week longlearning exchange. Pushing against the idea of “service” learning, this program attempts to enact a model of peer learning that positions program participants in the role of teacher/learner on both sides of the cultural crossing. Each North American is partnered with a Nicaraguan participant for the program duration in Nicaragua and together they interact with a range of community members (From preschool to elderly) in project based work.

From its inception, this program has engaged technology as a continuous connector bridging time and space and allowing for the growth of collaborative relationships between program participants in an ongoing cycle of learning. The learning process moves fluidly from structured to informal and back again, shifting focus and tools as needed to maintain relationships over time. The inclusion of technology in the program activities that take place in Nicaragua is intentional and creates openings for learning in multiple dimensions (exchange participants to echnage participant, exchange participant to community member, program staff to exchange particpant, etc…). The, relative, simplicity of use of tools such as digital cameras shift focus away from the tool to encourage a more creative teaching/learning relationship and gives rise to “expertise” that can be constructed fluidly between particpant teams. In any pairing, at any moment, the role of teacher/learner or learner/teacher may shift and shift again in response to tool use and the social context of program activity.

“Acquiring literacy does not involve memorising sentences, words or syllables … but rather an attitude of creation and re-creation, a self-transformation producing a stance of intervention in one’s context.”  Paulo Freire, Education: The Practice of Freedom (1973)

I’ve been reading Literacy: Reading the word & the world, by Freire and Macedo, and thinking about the concept of popular libraries. Freire talks about an “excellent project” that would include librarians, educators, et al in a process of survey by taped interview “of older inhabitants of the area, as contemporary witnesses, who would focus on the fundamental moments of their common history.” I was struck by the fact that some of this seems to be occurring now, enabled by adavnces in technology, in a variety of locations. But I’m unaware of any defined efforts at the creation of these popular libraries with intent and focus. Just because I am unaware doesn’t mean that it’s not happening, but a google search turns up very little.)

The power of technology, the ease with which stories, histories, can be captured, shared and preserved has far exceeded the tape recorders and pamphlets envisioned by Freire as a means of sharing among communities these diverse histories. It would seem like common sense to create a popular library in every community across the world – capturing, preserving and sharing all the stories – all of the different readings of the world. Consider the power of a network of these libraries, connected yet grounded in the local. A library of commonalities and diversities, multiphonic and democratic. It would still seem an “excellent project”.

And there is of course the danger of cultural appropriation, exploitation etc….there are always dangers which only re-emphasizes the necessity for local control, for all of us to “own” our stories and yet be able to share them in honesty and with trust.

Freire, P., & Macedo, D. P. (1987). Literacy: Reading the word & the world. South Hadley, Mass: Bergin & Garvey Publishers.

Just starting to gather my thoughts for an upcoming presentation on ICT and Agriculture, so what this is is a jumble – at this point. But I thought worth capturing here so I can refer to it as the process unfold. There are many directions to go in, all of them tempting but I’m going to strive for some focus here with this.

• Technologies to bridge lack of internet access (cd-roms, etc…)
• Importance of evangelists/sheperds to move the process forward (internal and external)
• diffusion | tech transfer —data vs knowldedge?
• Collaboration | Surfacing community based knowledge as an equivalent to academic knowledge
• ICT as embedded, not a stand alone
• Barriers of cost, literacy (traditional and tech), and power/existing power structures
• Transparency
• “The grim challenge of inclusion” ( is grim too strong?)
• Tech as support / re-inforcement of as opposed to replacement for

I also have 3 rough groupings of projects to hightlight – one a kind of mid-tier producer to producer exchange, projects that hightlight access and creative solutions to the issue of and knowledge sharing.

There are also interesting points of gender, mobility and so on that may be explicitily addressed.

There’s also the whole social networking thread, which has some validity here too.

Just a start….

In the past few days I’ve found some resources online that, at first blush, don’t necessarilly connect in any linear fashion. But there is something about the grouping that makes an intuitive sense to me and so I’d like to aggregate these resources in this post and see where it goes.

I had flagged, and have just begun reading ICTs and Informal Learning in Developing Countries (by Christopher Foster) and I have a feeling that this is a paper with some real life to it. I’d like to bring it into some discussions, using it as a lens to explore work that is happening both in New York State and the work I’m involved with in Nicaragua. This working paper shifts the emphasis from products to the process of actually using ICTs and creates a model of informal learning that integrates thinking from a range of different sources to help us better understand, and articulate, what it is we are actually trying to do in using ICT.

Directly on the heels of that is Radio as an Educational Media: Impact on Agricultural Development (pdf). a paper from 2010 published in SEARCH: The Journal of the Southe East Asia Research Centre for Communciation and Humanities, that once again highlights the role of an older technology and it’s current use and power in conveying agricultural educational opportunities. I’ve mentioned radio in the past as a reasonable and viable method of extension – this paper caught my eye because it makes mention of radio and health education in Nicaragua.

Latin America: The State of Smallholders in Agriculture (pdf) from IFAD offers an anlysis of smallholder data in light of changes in the economic, political and social structures in Latin America since the 80′s. This is a useful piece as I think about planning and conducting a farmer to farmer exchange between some people here (New York) and smallholders in Nicaragua. One of the final sentences strikes me: “A return to public policy focused on the provision of public goods is, then, the keystone development strategies that can be effective in assisting and supporting family farmers in Latin America today.” : as one of those things that is relavent both here and there and also emphasises a thread that I think might tie all of this together. Relocalizing while remaining connected…….

WOMEN BAREFOOT SOLAR ENGINEERS A COMMUNITY SOLUTION* is a pdf from the 55th session of the United Nations Commission on the Staus of Women highlights a program that empowers women and delivers a manageable scale tech solution process for delivering solar power to economically disadvantaged peoples in Africa. This is paired with a recent article from the New York Times, African Huts Far From the Grid Glow With Renewable Power which concretely illustrates the power of small, afforadable solar in rural communities.

And finally, Case Studies of Digital Participatory Budgeting in Latin America(pdf) , looks at the relationship between ICT’s and participatory processes for local governance. Drawing omn examples from Brazil, Peru and Argentina it offers case studies and critiques of the use of ICT to create spaces for citizen participation.

There is a thread here, one that I may not have teased out very well but it has something to do with the local/global connections, the power of technology – but technology to scale, or appropriate – and us as everyday people able to create and make change.

21st_Century_Literacies.pptx Download this file

It’s a framework really, and probably flawed at that; but one has to start somewhere. There’s more to this than shows up in the slides, but some of it is still in the thinking out loud stage.

A good article, with some interesting points about the history of Wisconsin that is contributing to current events. As someone who has long believed in the positive impacts of unions it’s finally nice to see a resurgence – let’s hope it continues to spread and unions halls across the country begin to ring with voices, discussing, debating and acting together in the interests of working people.

A while back I had a conversation with a friend about the importance of unions as kind of a neural territory- belonging to the union was a labor/work thing and cuts across the political, racial spectrum. It may be somewhat of a naive view but I believe there’s something in that…..must be some studies out there smewhere…?

Amplify’d from chronicle.com

The Wisconsin Idea

By Christopher Phelps

They have filled Madison’s Capitol Square and spilled down State Street, a sea of Wisconsin Badger red.

They have let it be known that they consider the right to a union essential to democracy and that they reject Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s plan to end collective bargaining for local, county, and state public employees on all issues apart from wages—including pensions, health insurance, and working conditions.

See more at chronicle.com

URL:  http://media.mit.edu/ventures/EPROM/index.html

SMS boot camps, mobile phone programming for entrepreneurs—in Africa. Same lessons apply in Nicaragua? I know I texted more in January, when I was there, than I ever had before. Folks I was with tended to text more frequently than voice call – issues of cost, etc…

More to mull around this topic – is it viable to connect U.S. to Nica textwise in any serious manner? Is it a viable delivery mechanism? What’s the impact of limited bandwidth for delivery of education and collaboration?