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BRINGing it OUT a notch
Duration:
24 minutes and 38 seconds
Country:
Colombia
Language:
Spanish
Genre:
None
Producer:
Diego Leal
Director:
Diego Leal
Views:
959
(716
embedded)
Posted by:
k12online on Dec 3, 2009
The amazing innovation we are seeing in many classrooms around the world still has a small impact, when compared to the size of our educational system. How do we bridge the divides to go bigger?
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Video Transcription
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- Hello, and welcome to the keynote presentation of the "Kicking it up a notch" strand,
- of the K-12 Online 2009 Conference.
- My name is Diego Leal, and I have been honored with the invitation
- to deliver the first Spanish keynote for K-12 Online.
- It's an honor,
- because this conference have included and includes a lot of fascinating people,
- whose inspiring work I have known on the web, and because
- for the first time ever, there have been included presentations in a language other than English,
- thanks to the efforts of people like Jose Rodriguez,
- who deserves special recognition for making this possible.
- Seeing the fantastic work that has been developed in the last years,
- and the diversity of approaches and presentations available this year,
- it is hard to imagine how to contribute to a conference as solid as this one.
- This year, we are starting to think about how to build bridges that help us
- to close some of the divides that still exist in our world.
- But in order to do that, we need to identify them first.
- So my contribution will be to try and give an additional perspective,
- from my own environment, to this discussion of how technology,
- in our educational spaces, can help to bridge those divides.
- What I want to propose this year, then,
- is that, besides "kicking it up a notch"
- we need to start "BRINGing it OUT a notch".
- I want to tell you where I come from.
- I'm from Colombia, in the top corner of South America,
- and I was born in Bogotá, but currently I'm living in Rio de Janeiro.
- In the next few minutes I want to share with you some personal stories,
- which have generated in me doubts about the real impact
- that we're achieving with the use of technology.
- Also, I want to share some ideas that could help to bridge the divides.
- So, the first story. It's a story about notebooks and the Middle Ages.
- These are some of my first school notebooks, 25 years ago.
- At the time,
- Mickey Mouse, Woody Woodpecker and Star Wars were quite popular,
- but it was also usual to have notebooks without any advertising,
- which were also cheaper.
- Obviously, every child wanted to have the other ones.
- But what matters is not how the notebooks looked, but what they contained.
- Here's one from 1984. It says it's a happy day, it's eight o'clock in the morning
- and I'm going to school, with an inventory of the supplies I carried in my back pack,
- and an approval from my teacher.
- In this notebook, you can also see a representation of the school.
- A closed space, where it seems that the most important thing are the classrooms.
- The drawing clearly shows my artistic limitations...
- Note the margin drawn around the sheet,
- used to clearly define the space in which I was "allowed" to write.
- This is a curious note I found in another notebook, from fifth grade.
- My teacher at the time pointed out that my notebook was very tidy,
- and suggested to keep it like that. Right now, I can't help to think
- about the subtle message behind a note like this,
- written by someone with the authority of my fifth grade teacher:
- The importance of order.
- This is a clear message of what mattered in the assessment, in this case.
- Reviewing the book and making sure it was tidy, was an important value.
- The funny thing is that in this context order means being linear...
- Another one: A math notebook. Note, once again, the defined margins
- and the sieve of Eratosthenes used to identify prime numbers from 1 to 100.
- Of course, I can't remember how long it took me to do this,
- but I'm afraid the purpose of the task was unclear to me at the time.
- And I wonder if there are children who are still doing this exercise having the same doubt.
- Another one, graphs of linear equations, which apparently were confusing to me.
- Something tells there wasn't any teacher reviewing this notebook,
- or else she would have said something about the big question marks
- seen in the top left corner of the sheet.
- And finally this one, of Geography. What surprised me about this notebook,
- which is from seventh grade, was not only how tidy it was, but its thickness.
- And its content, full of transcripts from different books.
- And not only text, but images...
- Among the tasks I recorded here, for example,
- you can find a map of the peopling of America by Paul Rivet.
- Copied from a textbook and properly colored
- like the text that accompanied it.
- My notebook was filled with many other maps like this,
- showing scenes from all over the world.
- I made those maps because that was the assigned homework,
- but I'm afraid I couldn't really figure out the purpose of doing it, at the time.
- Now, it's fair to say that I still have some knowledge of geography,
- but I'm not sure that doing these maps have much to do with it.
- As I watched my geography notebook an unexpected image came to my mind.
- The image of children sitting by, copying information from a book to their notebook,
- to complete the assigned task.
- And I discovered that this picture looks like another one I have in my mind,
- but that corresponds to the Middle Ages:
- that of the scribes who created these illuminated manuscripts.
- And then I discovered that, for most of my K-12 education,
- I spent my time training for a job
- that stopped being popular around 500 years ago.
- And even though this technology ended the burgeoning industry of scribes,
- just 25 years ago I was 'learning' geography in this way.
- Behind this, there is a problem that people like Michael Wesch
- have referred to in detail.
- During my school life, I'm afraid that my understanding of the curriculum,
- of its meaning, was equal to zero.
- Now, of course I knew two things about this curriculum:
- first, that its difficulty seemed to increase with time,
- which got me participating in an ever worrying obstacle race.
- And second, that what I had to study was composed of blocks
- rather abstract, a little cold and very static,
- which were very well demarcated from each other.
- So I saw Algebra for an hour a day, then History,
- and then Spanish, and later Science, and so on.
- One area had nothing to do with the other,
- unless it was accumulating on a previous topic.
- And so, I ended up feeling the curriculum as something that "happened" to me as a student,
- but about which I had no choice.
- I had to "like" everything equally,
- otherwise I would have to spend another year listening to the same thing over again,
- copying the same maps and the same information once more.
- So, basically, what I could never understand was what I was being educated for.
- Despite being happy at school,
- while I was there I could never understand its purpose.
- And you could imagine that this technology would help trigger creativity,
- to go beyond copying.
- However, it seems that for many of us
- plagiarism remains a critical issue, as well as its detection.
- The question I am left with is if this is the real lingering problem.
- In recent months, I've told this story in two different scenarios.
- First to teachers of Basic Education in Mexico
- and then to IT student teachers in Colombia.
- In both cases, I was surprised to find that many participants
- seemed to identify with the story, and seemed to recognize that
- the process of copying information is still common in their environment.
- This is distressing because when it comes to teachers,
- either they lived such a situation at some point, which is very likely,
- or they know colleagues who keep doing this practice,
- or they are doing it themselves, which is even more worrisome.
- On the side of students, it is distressing because many of them
- were about 20 years old, which means that very recently
- they were experiencing this situation.
- This suggests, then, that 25 years later,
- we have changed much less than we think.
- So here's a first divide:
- The meaning of what we do, because all around us,
- perhaps in our own institutions, there are many teachers
- training fabulous scribes for the 21st century.
- My second story is about a morning at the museum.
- In September I had the opportunity to visit
- the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City
- which has a fantastic collection that includes originals and replicas
- of countless pieces that account for the complex history
- of the human groups that have inhabited this country.
- My visit was on Sunday, in which admission is free.
- And during this visit, I found two unexpected things that caught my attention.
- I found the first one at the very beginning of the exhibition.
- This is one of many young people who, on Sunday, with a notebook in their hand,
- were at the museum copying the inscriptions on the displays that accompany the exhibition.
- But she wasn't the only one.
- Here are some other teenage boys copying the entries for evolution,
- available in the museum's wall.
- For his part, he seems to have an interest in the skulls of several hominids...
- But it is important to say that this is not a lonely task,
- and actually creates opportunities for "collaborative work".
- For example, here this kid is leaning against the back of another,
- so he can copy in a more comfortable way.
- But the ingenuity goes even further, as we also see a "division of labor".
- Those who are in the front are dictating to those who are behind,
- so they can complete the task faster.
- And, as you can expect in a world full of technology
- there are other interesting options.
- For example, she decided not to copy this board which tells a world creation myth,
- but to read it in her cell phone to transcribe it later, at ease.
- And she decided to make a video of the video
- that was showing on screen at the moment.
- So we can not say that the process is not "multimedia".
- What is distressing to me is that, even though you get to see cell phones in some cases,
- this is no different to what I did with my notebooks when I was in seventh grade,
- and is not unlike what the scribes were doing in the Middle Ages.
- The subtle difference is that, in this case,
- we are not talking about a process of preserving an ancient text,
- but about the product of the imagination of a teacher,
- because it's unlikely that a teen will go by her own choice to a museum,
- on a Sunday morning, to copy inscriptions in a notebook.
- The second thing that caught my attention was a teacher who was at the exhibition
- telling his students facts about Teotihuacan
- the complex of ruins that is located near the city.
- What I found odd was that some of the data that the teacher mentioned
- contradicted those in the slabs that are at Teotihuacan
- and the stories that some of the guides were telling there.
- Beyond a discussion about who is right,
- what I wonder is whether these kids leave the museum with a broad understanding
- of the multiple and changing interpretations that go with
- the thing we call "history", or if they are convinced that there is only one truth
- which corresponds to what we call "history",
- which was what I learned 25 years ago.
- So here's a second divide:
- In a world full of opportunities for innovation,
- such as those presented at this conference,
- we still see a large divide in the practices of most of our teachers.
- At all levels, those who are experimenting with other ways to do things remain a minority.
- The third story is about people, and getting perspective.
- Many of us have seen how these two technologies have changed our environment.
- And in fact, sometimes we live awaiting the next invitation
- to test the next tool that "will change the world."
- The problem is that this fascination sometimes
- can make us forget that the picture is much bigger.
- On this planet, at this moment, there are about 6,767,805,208 people.
- Is this high tech world,
- a percentage of them almost equivalent to 22% have no access to electricity,
- according to figures from the United Nations Development Programme.
- And about 38% of them
- among which are probably the ones without power,
- live on less than two dollars a day.
- Some 2,600 million people live an entire year
- with less than most of our laptops cost.
- And on this same planet, about 25% of the population is connected to the Internet.
- In practical terms, this means that all conversations
- that occur through all of these tools,
- can include, at the best, 1,733,993,741 people.
- However when we see, for example, the number of people who are users of Facebook,
- one of the great recent successes in social networks,
- it reaches only 300 million people,
- 4.4 percent of the world's population,
- and less than a quarter of Internet users.
- So, after all, not "everyone" is on Facebook.
- And when we look more closely at the web, we see things just as interesting.
- Here are some of the most popular languages in Wikipedia.
- As with most of the content on the Internet,
- the most prevalent is English. In this case, is the largest.
- Something interesting happens when we compare this
- with the number of native speakers of those languages.
- It is important to note that these figures do not correspond
- to the population of the countries where those languages are spoken,
- and that it's worth taking these figures with a grain of salt, even for illustrative purposes.
- In any case, if these sources are correct,
- this is the equivalent proportion of native speakers.
- And, given that I'm from Colombia, it's interesting to me
- the low level of contribution to the Spanish Wikipedia,
- which is in fact a reflection of what happens on the web, in general.
- When I look at the case of Colombia, I find two things:
- First, the percentage of people with Internet access at home,
- which has increased a lot in recent years, reaches just 17 per cent.
- Now, other figures speak of nearly 50 percent of the population with access,
- but it always depends on how you count,
- which reminds us how uncertain this data can be.
- Second, of the 44 million people in the country,
- it is estimated that only 2% have good English communication skills.
- This last figure suggests, then, that at least in the case of Colombia,
- the discussions concerning these tools,
- so popular for many of us, are even more limited,
- as well as our ability to provide our own ideas to the wider environment.
- Which brings us to a third composite divide
- perhaps more difficult to address than the previous ones:
- We have an access divide,
- added to a language divide and another participation divide.
- We have found that having access is not enough
- to participate actively in the many conversations
- happening in different places, or to bring them to our local environment.
- There is a barrier that we still don't see very well,
- and that greatly limits our participation in these environments.
- With these three stories, I want to suggest that we need to dare and take a jump.
- We may not fix those divides,
- but what we can do is to find ways so the conversation
- that happens here, starts to get to other places that it hasn't reached yet,
- and gets enriched with the perspectives of those who
- haven't been so connected or aren't so visible until now.
- So I want to share with you three ideas,
- that maybe can help us go where we haven't gone before.
- For the first one,
- I invite you to come with me to Medellín, Colombia,
- where Gabriel García Márquez public school is located.
- This institution is in one of the areas most impacted
- by the effects of the violence that existed during the first part of the 90's.
- The protagonist of this story is Olga Agudelo,
- who has been a teacher here for eleven years,
- and until two years ago was the coordinator of the entire area of Information Technology.
- This story begins in the computer room of the institution.
- Eight years ago, they had five machines and opened only in the mornings,
- because it was the only time that the coordinator was present
- to oversee the work of the students.
- At this point, Olga started a project called "Online Monitors",
- in which the keys of the computer room
- were progressively given to students.
- Along with the keys, they also got the responsibility
- to help other teachers in selecting materials to support their courses,
- to teach younger children to use computers
- and keep them in good condition.
- The two rooms which the institution currently have, are used
- for teacher training in the use of technology,
- and have also come to impact the community,
- getting together community mothers and elderly people
- to learn to use computers with the help of the kids.
- With time, new possibilities have come to the institution.
- Laptops have been delivered by the mayor's office,
- and this has made necessary to think about ways to demystify its use,
- and make them a natural and integral part of life in the institution.
- Many of the simple ideas that this school has implemented are,
- at times, counter-intuitive.
- When they got their first two laptops, for example,
- they decided to place them in a public place
- so that they could be used by any student who wanted to.
- With very good results.
- And the success of the project started, gradually, to impact other aspects of institutional life.
- With the support of institution's principal,
- similar projects in other areas started to be implemented.
- In addition to "Online Monitors",
- new projects appeared in areas as the Environment
- Use of free time,
- Library, Inventory, Sex education,
- School newspaper, Democracy, School radio and Music group.
- All these sub-projects are now part of a larger initiative,
- called "We hand over the keys."
- As in the original project,
- in all cases the students have a high degree of autonomy in their decisions,
- and are responsible to spread their activities in the institution,
- and to convene new children interested in being part of these processes.
- Thus, a project that began as a solution to managing a computer room
- began to slowly radiate other academic areas,
- and eventually many other aspects of institutional life,
- creating new spaces for interaction between students and teachers.
- The project has also impacted the local community,
- and has allowed the institution to become an important point of reference at the national level,
- through its participation in collaborative projects
- promoted by the country's educational portal.
- And beyond this, it has allowed teachers and students to take active part
- in collaborative projects with institutions from other places of the world,
- as Chile, Peru, United States, Canada
- and even African countries like Burkina Faso.
- The computer, to that extent, has become
- a window to the world for this community in the city of Medellin.
- So this is the first jump that I want to propose:
- Handing over the keys as a symbol of giving more autonomy
- and involve more people in the projects
- we are already doing in our classrooms.
- Second idea: In 2007, I had the unique opportunity to launch
- an experiment for the Ministry of Education of Colombia,
- which has already been conducted in several cities,
- and even in one Mexican city.
- This experiment, which we call EduCamp,
- is a one-day experience in which participants are invited
- to visualize their Personal Learning Environment,
- identifying the physical spaces, people, resources and tools
- with which they are currently learning, so they can improve it with new tools,
- both technological and of other kinds,
- that are suggested on a sheet that serves as a roadmap for the session.
- Interestingly, in an EduCamp it is not expected
- for anyone to learn the same things that someone else will.
- The workshop takes place in an unstructured space,
- in which every person can be both an apprentice and an expert throughout the day.
- Unknown people sit together and show to each other the use of technology,
- share their knowledge about tools
- and ideas about their use in educational settings
- The idea of un-structure is at stake even in the physical space.
- Participants find furniture rather strange for a workshop,
- and an environment that makes possible even sitting on the floor to learn from others and with others,
- and which proposes new ways of understanding concepts such as tagging,
- as a way to make explicit to themselves and others
- those things in which they have expertise.
- Throughout the day, participants begin to discover
- a new way of understanding learning,
- and explore how technology can help us learn,
- create and relate differently with the world.
- The interesting thing is that even when the physical space is much more structured
- the proposed activities help people to understand
- that the possibilities offered by technology can lead us
- to rethink the way we build understandings through conversation.
- This allows that, at the end of the workshop, each person
- has built a personal network that enriches both her life and her practice.
- The EduCamp foster a connected environment, in every way,
- which gives a lot of autonomy to each learner,
- leveraging the diversity of experience and knowledge of participants,
- allowing all perspectives to be heard.
- At the same time, it shows that learning spaces
- can be chaotic and unstructured,
- and that this does not limit but enhance the learning experience.
- The second jump I want to suggest is the importance of modeling new practices,
- that allow us to bring the potential of technology to the "real world"
- to expand and strengthen the networks that we are part of
- and reinvent what we do every day.
- Third idea.
- The dominance of English around the planet
- has given rise to a wide network of conversations
- and a well-established community in several places.
- This conference is an example of what such a well-established community
- can accomplish.
- What I want to propose is for us to explore ways to bring these conversations
- to places where the language divide becomes an obstacle.
- To imagine ways that allows us to create two-way connections
- so we can all be enriched by new perspectives
- from all over the world.
- This isn't necessarily an original idea.
- Global Voices started a volunteer translation project in 2006,
- and organizations such as Translations for Progress try and get together
- volunteer translators with NGOs
- that need their services.
- A project in this line in which I have participated
- is the TED Open Translation Project, launched in February 2009,
- which already has nearly 2000 volunteers around the world.
- When this initiative began,
- many of us were doing the process on our own,
- until Pedro Villarrubia, through a group in Google Groups,
- began to convene a group of people around the globe,
- which have make possible Spanish to be the language with more translations in TED.
- To translate a video or document is a process that actually
- serves to build bridges of all kinds.
- And among the tools we have to build those bridges
- there are platforms are as dotSub or Google Docs, and applications like Jubler,
- which facilitate the process of transcription and subtitling of videos.
- What is important for our case
- is that this transcription process may be an excuse
- to engage our students in building these bridges.
- We may be many more if we encourage our students to work
- to generate products that help innovative ideas
- to reach remote corners of the planet.
- But having a video with subtitles in its original language
- is to have half the bridge built.
- And other people can help build the other half.
- Again, many of us have experienced
- the process of translating such material,
- and people like Gabriela Sellart have tried to involve their students in it,
- inviting them to generate products that can have an unimagined impact.
- The construction of these bridges, at least in my experience,
- requires the translator to learn a lot about the subject area involved in the translation.
- It's one of the most challenging learning experiences I have faced.
- So I want to echo an idea that Jose Rodriguez and others
- are starting in the K-12 Online Conference this year.
- We have about 42 presentations from 2006,
- 41 from 2007 and 40 from 2008,
- some of which are already in the process of transcription.
- The same is happening with some of this year's presentations,
- especially those that will be delivered in Spanish.
- So the invitation is to use the conference to organize ourselves
- and start joint work that allows us
- to have the presentations from this conference in other languages.
- But we don't have to stop there.
- There are many video sites on the web,
- containing valuable educational material in many languages,
- waiting to be translated to reach many places around the planet.
- So this is about each one of us building a piece of the bridge,
- so that we can put together those pieces later
- to generate new connections and stimulate further discussions.
- The third jump that I want to propose, then,
- is to take our ideas further, using translation as a possible way
- to build bridges where none exist yet.
- In this presentation,
- I've tried to point out a number of divides
- which we still need to learn more about.
- The first one has to do with finding
- and convey a broader meaning in our educational work.
- The second one speaks about the need to communicate to a wider audience
- the practices we are developing,
- because the innovation we do is starting to get trapped
- in a limited space.
- The third one has to do with three elements a bit more complicated,
- but also present: the limitations of access and language
- of a large proportion of the population, and barriers to participation in online spaces
- that we are beginning to see.
- Then I wanted to share some jumps that, from my perspective,
- can help to bridge these divides:
- First, daring to "hand over the keys"
- to our students and others.
- Building autonomy to take what we do to a wider audience.
- The second jump has to do with modeling new practices
- in our face to face environments.
- To transfer the possibilities of technology to the "real world"
- in order to generate new types of conversations with colleagues and students.
- The third step seeks to bring our ideas further,
- using opportunities such as translation of part of the existing content on the net.
- These are ideas in construction,
- and in fact they are just some of all that we can imagine together.
- That's why it's important to leverage the opportunities for discussion in K-12 Online
- to meet each other, imagine possibilities and agree
- on strategies for building bridges,
- allowing us to go beyond this sphere,
- to enrich our perspective with new worldviews
- and generate new conversations about the major issues of our time.
- That will let us not only kick it up a notch, but bring it out a notch.
- Everyone is invited to help with that!
- This presentation does not end here.
- For detailed information on the resources used,
- or to add yourself to a list of people interested
- in developing collaborative translation projects,
- you can visit this wiki:
- http://bioan09.wikispaces.org.
- Also, given that this is a one-hour talk,
- I invite you to use the remaining 25 minutes thinking
- about what are the divides you can see in your own environment,
- and to imagine some possible jumps that we can take to bridge them.
- Then use the conference online spaces to share your reflections.
- We want to hear your ideas! :-)
- Translation: Diego Leal & Jose Rodriguez


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