Education / Educación

This is the title of the panel in which I’m partiicipating right now, in the eMadrid workshop on e-learning (organized by the eMadrid network at Universidad Carlos III, Leganes, Spain). I’m not sure which new horizons we will have in this e-learning thing in the next years, so I have just talked about two topics that I would like to see addressed, and to some extent that I feel we need to address, in this near future. They are not technological, though they are mediated by technology: using IT support to let students exploit their full potential, and sharing, reusing, and improving learning materials. Some more details (just a few) in the slides I’ve used. The panel is being recorded, so I expect it to be available online soon (keep an eye on the eMadrid website).

While attending an inteteresting talk organized by e-Madrid, I’ve learned about libre (free, open source) machinery for building 3D virtual worlds.

I already knew about Croquet, but it seems to have evolved a lot since I last installed it. And now they are also building Cobalt, also libre, which aims to be a platform for constructing, accessing, and sharing hyperlinked virtual workspaces for research and education, based in Croquet.

OpenSim is a 3D Application Server which can be used to create a virtual worlds. It can be accessed via clients such as Hippo or the Second Life client. In fact, it seems that you can build the kind of worlds that you may find in Second Life, although it is not aimed to be a clone of it. You can use an already established server for a quick evaluation, but apparentely installing it to have your own server is not that difficult.

Open Wonderland is a platfor for building and running 3D virtual worlds. It seems to be oriented to developers, since part of the building implies Java programaming. A lot of modules provide ready-to-use extensions.

It has been a good surprise to me to see that this area is already being colonized by libre software. I’m going to find time to test all of these. Meanwhile, if you know some other alike libre project, or have comments about the ones in this post, please let me know.

Should professors at Universities do research? Should they do teaching? Both? [Can both be done?] How should curricula be? (more practice, more theory, an equal mix of both?) Why are they as they are? If you teach (and/or research) at a University, probably you have had many coffees while talking about all of this. And lunchs, and even Department meetings . Certainly I’ve had more than a few of them.

That’s probably why the blog entry “What’s new here: how academic research has ruined our education system“, by Roger Schank kept my attention, up to the last word. Quite an interesting opinion on why many curricula in Universities are like they are… In the end, it is a nice way of elaborating about the common say “In University you are supposed to do good teaching, but you’re only evaluated by how good you’re at research”. An (almost) quote that probably summarizes it all: “students are not told that for (many) professors research, not them, is first”.

By the way, quite a nice motto for the blog (Education Outrage) itself: “There are only two things wrong with the education system: what we teach and how we teach it”. Feed for thought!

[Thanks to pheras for the link]

Hace ya mucho tiempo, un amigo interesado en la informática y las comunicaciones, pero sin tiempo ni muchas posibilidades para ponerse al día, me comentó lo difícil que lo tenía para no perderse en el mundo de la tecnología. Al final su única opción era hablar con amigos o compañeros, leer alguna cosa aquí y allá, y tratar de aprender de esa manera. Echaba de menos cursos intensivos, a los que pudiera asistir sin demasiado impacto en su vida personal o laboral, y orientados exactamente a su perfil.

Años después, veo que hay quien ha detectado el mismo problema, y además le ha puesto solución. La cosa se llama “Barnetegi Tecnológico“. Junta a los “alumnos” dutrante un día (una tarde/noche y la mañana del día siguiente) y les da un baño bastante intensivo. El esquema se podría adaptar a fines de semana e incluso podría haber versiones para familias. Y se podría adaptar a necesidades específicas: conocimientos de software libre, de formas de comunicación en Internet, de tecnologías móviles, etc.

Las claves, desde mi punto de vista: organizado de forma que no hagan falta conocimientos tecnológicos específicos (esto es, orientado a profesionales no-TIC), muy focalizado en lo que les puede interesar, y combinación de “muestras de tecnologías” con manos en la masa y “enseñar a aprender”. En fin, una buena idea…

[Gracias a dacal por el puntero]