Nessa semana, eu e outros
voluntários organizamos alguns encontros e oficinas no SESC Pompéia
sobre a enciclopédia livre Wikipédia e seus projetos irmãos. Nessa
quarta (18) o foco será educação e na próxima quarta (25) política, as
oficinas ocorrendo ao longo da semana.

Se você já pensou em participar da Wikipédia e outros projetos de
produção colaborativa de conhecimento, essa é uma boa oportunidade
para tirar suas dúvidas, inclusive para trazer críticas para
melhorarmos o que já temos.

Segue abaixo mais detalhes sobre os encontros e as oficinas

http://is.gd/4VHTJ

Quem quiser ajudar de alguma forma, por entrar em contato comigo.

Ajudem também a divulgar em outras listas e entre seus contatos. Todos
estão gentilmente convidados.

Abraços,

Tom

--
http://blogdotom.wordpress.com/sobre

Veja também o flyer:

Our (ambitious, not-realized) goal for this session was to come up with recommendations for 

• institucional decision and policy makers
• implementers
• staff and students

Systems vs Platforms

But before diving into the details, it is worth taking a birds-eye view and ask: do we need integrated systems (like Moodle or Connexxions) or should we (the OER movement) focus on general purpose platforms used by individuals (like the Web, or general repositories). There are trade-offs: integrated systems like connexions can be specialized for educational purposes. Their centralized and institutional nature makes it easier to do preservation, resource management and indexing for search, etc. On the other hand, decentralized and non-specialized systems can be used by everybody right now, without needing permission or special knowledge, lending themselves especially to bottom-up, grassroots initiatives.

In both cases, we would like to work with standards for the formats of the resources (documents, audio, video, lesson plans, exercises, etc. etc.). In the case of a integrated systems they serve as a means for data portability and interoperability from one system to another. In the case of "the Web" they also serve as the glue between the distributed actors, enabling the formation of a network that can then be indexed, search, etc.

But top-down, designed-by-committee standards like the IMS ones or SCORM have notoriously slow uptake in the community. It was suggested (by Richard) to recommend de-facto content standards like PDF, .odf or even .doc as opposed to educational standards which have orders of magnitude less support "in the wild". Inevitably, there will be debate about the pros and cons of closed and proprietary standards versus the open ones. I suggested that individual users should be able to use whatever works for them but that the recommendation for implementers of institutional systems should be to use open standards, for all the well-known reasons (independence off single vendors, digital preservation, etc.)

Roadmap

The implementation and maintenance of technical infrastructure is a continuous process, especially in the fast-moving ICT environment where the ground is always shifting. John suggested that under those circumstances it is useful to keep in mind the characteristics of an "ideal" system, to remember in what direction we want to move. This vision could be called an Open Educational Architecture and would include

• the use of appropriate (for education) open standards to foster interoperability and preservation;
• giving teachers and students the tools to remix and reuse resources ("learning objects") not only legally or theoretically but in actual practice;
• making possible educational processes like assessment, tracking of access and use, tutoring and communication tools, etc.;
• but disassociate "learning management" from typical OER functionality like repository, versioning, recombining, etc.

The vision thing is nice, but we need to stuff right now. Connexions is an open source OER management system, conceptually build in two layers: the content model and the web application (build with Zope and Plone). The development model of this open source project for now is one with a small core-team, but work is underway to make it easier to incorporate external contributions, to make deployment easier and to increase governance stability through a foundation more or less like the Sakai foundation. Richard is very confident about the long term viability and stability of the xml technologies that implement the content model. It is possible that the plone layer that implements the user (web) interface will change on a shorter timescale.

"Ao passo que países mundo afora mobilizam-se para implementar projetos de educação aberta, os países em desenvolvimento procuram otimizar o uso da internet para substituir sistemas educacionais ultrapassados e ineficazes. Neste contexto, é preciso examinar o que tem sido e o que ainda está por ser feito: é essencial aprender com as histórias de sucesso e compreender como projetos já existentes podem ser melhor conectados."

Nos dias 29 e 30 de outubro haverá uma conferência focada em Recursos Educacionais Abertos, na Escola de Direito do FGV em São Paulo. O evento é oganizado e idealizado pela Carolina Rossini, formado em direito pela USP, com passagens pela FGV, UNESP, Boston University e agora membro do Berkman Centre em Harvard, trabalhando com Yochai Benkler e apoiado pelo Open Society Institute para estudar REA no Brasil.

Neste evento participarão acadêmicos do exterior (Prof. Baraniuk, do Rice University, Prof. Shuwer, da Universidade Aberta da Holanda e outros), acadêmicos do Brasil, políticos (Dep. Federal Dr. Carlos Abicalil) e empresários do exterior e brasileiros.

Certamente é um evento imperdível para qualquer um que se interesse para o futuro da Educação no Brasil. Segue a localização, contato e programação: