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/

Last week I was fortuante to be able to attend a USAID sypmosium on mobles for education for development. During the course of the two day symposium I heard, more than once, that we “need a new pedagogy” for mobiles in education. Having thought about this for a while I’m begining to wonder if that’s really true. There are ample and adequare pedagogical frameworks that could easily fold in mobile devices as methods of learning – at least I think this to be the case. And there is some work out there that points to this. So I’m unconvinced that we need something new, pedagogically speaking.

What seems to be needed are new educational systems that can accomodate technology, in a pedagogically sound way, as a tool for learning. Infusing technology into already constrained systems and hoping for magic, or waiting for the evolution of new pedagogies that shoehorn tech into these systems doesn’t address the root issues, nor does it seem to acknowledge the liberatory potential of the tools.

Without a doubt, attempting to push back against the tide of testing and no child left behind is a more daunting task than positing new thoeries. But without creating spaces and alternatives to  “traditional” schooling environments would seem to insure that tech will always be used as an add on or annoyance or even ignored.

Earlier this morning I came upon a paper by James McShay, of the University of Maryland, Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 titled “Paulo Freire’s Liberatory Pedagogy: Rethinking Issues of Technology Access and Use in Education”, which appears in the volume “International Exploration of Technological Equity and the Digital Divide”.  This is just one example of some of the work that is being done around issues of the use of technology anchored in a solid pedagogical foundation. 

The potential of technology to reshape learning is real, but the hard work is still ahead of us.

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.

ict-ag1.mp3 Listen on Posterous

A short audio excerpt from my presentation “ICT for Agricultural Extension”.

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….

I was thinking about small craft production, learning and mentoring and related topics this morning on my way into work ( an exciting start to Monday, it’s true) and then had to send out a message to some participants in an online course I’m currently involved with. Being in that Monday morning mindset where things run one into another I naturally wanted to know if anyone had looked at using distance learning technologies to either teach or preserve knowledge generated by craftspeople, and how that was done or how efective it might be.

At this point I’ve turned up 2 articles and circled back to a book from a while ago that is related – though the book expands expands the conversation (quite?) a bit. 

FISHER, Tom, KEYTE, Julia and WOOD, Nicola (2009). Hands on – hands off on hitting your thumb with a virtual hammer. In: Undisciplined! Design Research Society Conference 2008, Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield, UK, 16-19 July 2008. http://shura.shu.ac.uk/539/

Sawchuk, P. H. (2003). Adult learning and technology in working-class life. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

WOOD, Nicola (2009). The new journeyman: The role of an expert learner in eliciting and transmitting skilled knowledge. In: Undisciplined! Design Research Society Conference 2008, Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield, UK, 16-19 July 2008. http://shura.shu.ac.uk/505/

Off to a meeting now. Hoepfully more to come.

Global_Networks.pptx Download this file

Harnesssing the power of connectedness. Needs the narration, which hopefully will come soon. Running it for the first time tomorrow – we’ll see how it goes.

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.