Current events

Following in the footsteps of the Modern School’s creator and pedagogue, Francesc Ferrer i Guàrdia, the 11th Zemos98 festival is to open up a free space for radical educational experimentation in Seville. The festival is to show how the current creative and research processes are developing in this knowledge area, offering a venue for “learning by doing” which is to host, alongside the symposium, audiovisual concerts, sound experiences and audiovisual projections.

“The urgency of an open education: cheap emotions, radical reuse and learning based on content syndication” is the title of the talk by Brian Lamb, UOC visiting professor and coordinator of the University of British Columbia’s Office of Learning Technology. This talk, which is open to the public, looks at a range of questions including: What is the difference between schools and other cultural industries? What is the difference between reuse and plagiarism? Can educators get over their concerns and enjoy remixes? Has the logic implicit in digital media changed our educational institutions? Is originality overrated? The aim of the session is to look at the opportunities and initiatives that have arisen from the emergence of open-source user-controlled tools, and from the culture and resources of open education. Another highlight of the talk is the analysis of the opportunities generated by the leading open education projects and the challenges the development of an open education culture implies.

David Gómez, teaching collaborator on the UOC multimedia studies and lecturer in interaction design at Barcelona’s Elisava design school, is to present the GRFwiki project, which is based on Mediawiki software (used, among others, by Wikipedia) and a number of plug-ins, including Semantic MediaWiki and SemanticForms. GRFwiki is a repository of references to complement teaching material and a site for publishing work. Students use it to hand in their work to be assessed, which means they can compare their own work with that of their classmates and, on occasions, offer comments or mutual support. It also makes it easier to link to other work that has been handed in. The accumulation produced on the wiki also allows for a form of ‘collaboration’ between semesters, whereby the work of one group of students affects that of the students in the following year.

Two other projects on the adoption of new technological tools (in any of their formats) in learning (formal, non-formal and informal), Camon (Alicante) and WIKIM (Europe-wide), form part of the presentation by the graduate in the UOC’s training distance education trainers, Oscar Martínez. This session looks to encourage reflection on a series of basic ideas that contrast the traditionally held concepts that were deemed irrefutable on education and learning processes. The figure of the trainer/educator disappears to give way to a new player who is essentially a catalyst for new ways of learning and accessing knowledge.