How’s eKindling being kindled?!

It’s been months now since we decided to formally formed a group in the Philippines called eKindling which is short for Education Kindling, eKindling will allow us to further and bring in the education project in our very own country the Philippines.

eKindling

eKindling is the result of the collaboration of people who’s been supportive in bringing OLPC’s mission and vision to the Philippines.

The question is how is it coming along? I’m pretty amazed on how people respond given we haven’t really fully launched the organization, but we tremendously received support volunteers to help what’s been on our plate for quite sometimes now. Like…

We’re set to get our non-profit status by the second week of September or sooner than this.

We’ve signed up two new Board members and still in search for more nominees.

The website is in progress and hopefully will have a polished and final site by the end of this month. Many thanks to all the volunteers.

Our team mates (Jerome, Ryan and Sandeep) are also set to talk to the Y4IT youth summit and they will do a 30 minute presentation about eKindling and the OLPC’s sugar activity development.

A partnership agreement with two intending Universities are about to be set and hopefully garner us a pool of students who will develop in Sugar.

Also, content development is now being develop along side of things, from squeak/etoys to current sugar activities. Cherry is about to unleash her developing skills on writing up some lesson/activity plans in a Philippine context, and hopefully I can jump in quickly to help her.

A free office space is on the fly???! at first is this for real?! a free office space right in the heart of Manila? We can’t afford that the utilities and all miscellaneous things …and our donor said it’s all free? WOW! I’m amazed on how things are coming along with eKindling. But as the saying goes crossing our fingers about all this and we’re all cautiously optimistic about this whole thing until it gets finalized.

With regards to the pilot test, we just recently proposed a pilot test plan in OLPC’s contributors program. It still in progress and we’re strategically straightening some check points to finally get the community’s approval on our proposal. We’re hoping also that once we get incorporated we can start the fundraising.

So, if you come across this blog plz feel free to contact mmago At ekindling dot org or visit our sites wiki and eKindling website! or email us community At ekindling dot org.

Mabuhay ang batang Filipino!

Open Education is this for real?

Actually, this question is for the Open Education Conference 2009, they’re offering travel scholarships to people who can significantly contribute in the conference. What a great way to spread the buzz around
in a very innovative way by using blogs as a marketing tool. Here are the two important things to consider in the blogs.

1. What you would “bring” to the conference? What can you contribute, be it a willingness to volunteer to moderate a session, some special expertise or project, an already accepted proposal…
2. What you see as the most critical issue facing you in your efforts around Open Education, and how you think the conference can help you address it?

The Mozilla Open Education course, was a great way to connect me again to the academe industry. A perfect way to blend my education and technology background. It’s true that you never get old when we talked about learning. And especially this whole concept of Open learning and pedagogy. The Open pedagogical thing just impressed me and got my attention and re-connect me with my passion of service and getting it back to the community.

There are so many new things to learn, that if I can just click my fingers get all these implemented in the Philippine education system.

I see OER as a breakthrough in education. A great opportunity for the third world country to leverage learning. But, there’s a big question about this, how this can be implemented in the third world county where in govern by traditional educators or the technophobe. Like, in my country the Philippines it’s hard to implement such openess since they value ownership so much. But it never stopped me from wishing, I
believe that all these Open Education movement activism will eventually create awareness, as how it reaches people now. I was thinking on what I can bring to the Open Education 2009 event? All, I can think of is that I don’t have any expertise yet to bring in to the event, but rather I have tons of questions that emerged relating to understanding and promoting the impact of open education efforts, especially to all the speakers on this event and people who successfully adopt open education.

* How they were able to encourage learners, educators and school owners to participate in open education?
* What does open education mean for both formal and informal education?
* How did they started Open education activism in their University?
* What supports needs to be provided in adopting Open Education?

Here’s my vision on how I see Open Education in the third world country’s perspective and how it can be facilitated. These are inspired by some org, people that introduce me to OER and Open education activism
events/programs.

* Introduce OER to the Philippine schools
* Create and facilitate an online asynchronous seminar on Open Education for Philippine educators.
* Moderate and facilate a topic on this in Open education 2009 event on “How Open education be represented in a wider and developing country”.”Perspective on how open education be recognize and can be a credited subject.
* Help spread the word about Open education movements.
* Think strategically or creative way on how to promote Open Education in the Philippines.
* Facilitate and help educators who are interested to adopt Open education in their Universities.
* Continue participating in Open education activism.

The big question on my mind is the HOW? I don’t have a concrete answer at this time, I may have for some but I believe the more, I collaborate to Open Education community the more that I can answer the “how” of all these goals.

I see, this Open Education 2009 events, as a venue to learn and understand more about Open Education, get me more inspired to continue the goals that I have for my country and other developing country. To explore, listen and collaborate who have been successful implementing in their own way the Open Education.

I just currently moved here in the US as a student and will freshly start schooling this fall. Since I got here the Open Education Activism and OLPC volunteering got my attention and interest. So, I’m really looking forward to this Open Education Conference 2009 and the travel scholarship opportunity.

Great initiative!

A personal take on OLPC: Vision vs Reality

What do you think about OLPC program?

When I first learned about OLPC, I said this is an amazing project , that would bring a new perspective to kids in the developing country, as well empowered them not to become parasites but rather bring out change in their own future and to the next generation. Hence, I ended up wishing, I wish I have the financial resources to bring this to the Philippines and support the program and help carry out the goals successfully. That was my initial thought , when I learned about OLPC’s program. As I get curious about the organization, I started to follow and read articles about the organization and do some volunteering stuff for the org. However, there are some articles that really made me understand some of the loop holes of OLPC’s deployments and there are some articles that made me ask more questions and wonder.

What’s your personal take on some articles that you’ve read?

I’ve read positive articles and negative articles…in which I see it as a way to help both the organization and the people behind it to realized things and tried their best to make the vision into a reality.

But part of me, thinking, if only all these people who have the resources help to spread and realize what are the things needed inorder for OLPC’s vision turned into a reality, maybe a lot of people would become aware that this program involves collaboration from both common people, influential people and brilliant people.

Do you have any What if on this?

Well…I was just enviosioning like WHAT IF…
- all these brilliant people who have a beautiful mind can help out and be a part of these amazing program…
- all these media will write and spread on to activism,creating awareness to developing countries about this program and try their best resources to reach as many people as they can to introduce OLPC…
- every single person who find this project amazing and think of how they can help…by any means, as there’s no small things when you’re helping …greater things always comes from small things.
- nobody would dare to take a risk on innovation and change, you think we’ll have the chance to have all these things that we’re enjoying right now.

I believe in general, that we can’t do everything but I know we can do something.
Thus, can I leave one question?
…if you could have one best thing to offer to help OLPC’s vision, what would it be?

of course I can’t help to include Michael Jackson’s quote…as my tribute to him…:)

“In a world filled with hate, we must still dare to hope. In a world filled with anger, we must still dare to comfort. In a world filled with despair, we must still dare to dream. And in a world filled with distrust, we must still dare to believe.”

– Michael Jackson

Open Learning and Pedagogy: A new perspective for the academia?

We ended our #Mozopeneducation with the Open Learning and Pedagogy, Philip Schmidt invited some people who are believers and are all practitioners of Open learning model as panelist for the presentation and discussion.
Jason B. Jones – incorporate open learning tools such as wiki in his teaching .
Garin Fons of University of Michigan – dScribe and Open Michigan
George Siemens of CCK08 – Connectivism and Connective Knowledge .

All these are indeed innovative for the educators and the whole academe as well. But, other part of me says how about educators from the developing countries, how do they view this Open learning? and how it is being embraced/accepted globally? Would this be the learning in the 21st century?

With all these thoughts, some blogs about it, initiatives, events here and there…still it creates a new perspective to the academe industry. In which it’s not only a one sided thing that students are the only receiver and teachers as the feeder, in other words traditional. However, this is not a way of discarding the traditional way of teaching …as human needs physical interaction, but a blend of Open pedagogy will be a fun and very innovative way to view learning. Isn’t cool to have and see how learning evolves now, and how everyone collaborate regardless of what they believe in, where they are and what they are into. All these just takes away human selfishness….:) and open us to a wide range of information and learning dissemination.

Wazz up with Mozilla Open Educ?

We’re almost done with our Mozilla Open Education course. Part of the course requirement we have to come up with a project blue print. I came up with two project blue prints. Where in the first one is I can say a dream blue print and the other one is more on a realistic blue print.

A. A mash-up project (Social Media for Kids ages 5-12) hahaha! I know that there will be a lot of restriction for this kind of space. BUt, if we’re going to really digest and create activities that are suited for their age I believe there’s no reason for us to do this. If we’re looking into the future of social media. Rather seeing young kids lied about their age in facebook, why not we create one solely for kids. Well, I haven’t received any comment from my course group on this ….as they have also other proposal for a mash-up project. Maybe this can also evolve into an OER platform where in kids can collaboratively share, create and learn from other kids around the globe.
B. An Open Source Development online course and OER – I came up with this idea, after talking to OER (Open Education Resources) specialist from University of Michigan, that they have OER medical courses in their university, which bring me back to what we had in Exist. Where in we teach Open Source Development to some Universities. But, implementing one course was too heavy in logistics. But, running this Open Source Development course online (using OS tools and technologies) will reach more people globally and will entail huge collaboration from the people who are expert and been in a while in OS development. A great opportunity also for individuals who have the passion in Software Development and service, This seems interesting as I received so many inputs and comments from our MOzopenedu group. I’m really looking forward to have this implemented. The web tech presentation of Ben and Dion from Mozilla Labs on the week 5 of our course was interesting and I thought of including it in this course.

Hopefully we can come up with the final project blueprint, still snooping on some inputs and ideas to put together.

Mabuhay!

Nos-i @OpenEverthing NYC2009

It was an interesting event. I arrived a little bit late and missed the opening remarks of John Britton and the talk of Schuyler Erle of UNICEF. So, I just immediately jump in to some sessions. Since, this was an Open Everything event, true enough, you can see a mash-up kinda things of ideas and people. Here are some of the sessions and highlights of the events. I was mostly in OER’s sessions:

1. OER (Open Education Resources) – Discussions circled around these topics, in which divides the different areas of OER.

– Content Development and Sustainability: Top-down vs. Bottom-Up
– Technical components of Supporting OER (Data Entry, data gathering, verification)
– Peer Review and Credibility
– Higher Education / Secondary Education
– Licensing and Legal Frameworks
– Intercultural Collaboration Cultural Sensitivity
– OER initiatives – some sites that are around now
– Aggregating some OER contents

I had a chance to meet Garin Fons an Open Education Specialist at University of Michigan, they have done so far a tremendous job on OER. You can find some of their projects here. I’ve also chatted a bit to him about Open SOurce Development, in which he sees it as a great OER content.

With all these OER’s … nobody will be handicapped about information and learning.

Also, met somebody who’s from greenmap.org, connecting people towards green living. They provide various information, resources and direction.

One of the high lights of the event was the talk of Robert Steele, He’s the CEO of OSS.net. A tough guy I can say …since how can you talk about the secrecy of information in an open world. He also distributed free copies of this book “The New Craft of Intelligence Personal, Public, & Political–Citizen’s Action Handbook for Fighting Terrorism, Genocide, Disease, Toxic Bombs, & Corruption. I haven’t read the whole book yet… but it seems very intriguing and interesting. It’s his first book on Intelligence…spies and secrecy in an Open World???!!!.

Leslie Hawthorn’s talk, addresses “What goes at the middle of this Open world?”. It is us people who are involved in the community, contributors and volunteers.

Overall the event was attended by interesting people, from different backgrounds, it was such an “Open Everything event” Food and drinks was also available. Can you add coffee next time.

Thanks and Congratulations John Britton and his group who made this possible.

Open Everything @NYC 2009!

Open everything is not a tech conference, there’s much more to “open” than technology. Which is really interesting, like before we usually heard if it’s open …we kinda linked it to technology like open source, and that usually only tech people are involved but with Open everything it gives everyone the idea that there’s so much to explore and unleash about.

I’ll write more after the event.

Nosi with Openess

For two weeks now, I had a chance to get in a Mozilla Open Education course in collaboration with ccLearn and Peer 2 Peer University. This course is facilitated by Philip Schmidt of Peer 2 Peer University, Frank Hecker of Mozilla Foundation, Ahrash Bissell of ccLearn.

I just recently got into open education, though been exposed with Open Source development. The whole thing about Open Education amazes me. Especially, we’re talking about learning in a different kind of level. A very innovative way of delivering and sharing learning.

The question is how does the typical institution or the traditional way of teaching view this Open Education? In my own perspective, this is a great way to help school, students and teachers maximize what’s available in the web and how different people collaborate and share their learning. This bring a lot of opportunities to everyone, a great way to help those people who are under privileged to afford the same learning that some privilege countries have. This is not a way of replacing the traditional way of teaching or the institutional way of learning, this is a way of expanding the future of learning and how education have evolve.

Here’s a video of Michael Wesch “A vision of students today”. This is very interesting,

The XO machine…

Is this a real laptop machine or just one of those v-tech toys? This is a very usual comments that you would hear everytime they see this XO. Well, for one it looks like a toy, and yes this is design for kids ages 5-12 though adults too will find this interesting.:) Anyway learning is never ending.

Yes, this XO machine is real…:) works and perform just like the usual laptops. The only difference with this laptop is that, this small machine has a big mission. The activities are basically design for kids to explore on and its very energy efficient and functional. A great tool to enhance kid’s desires to learn new things and go beyond what they can do.

Every activity in the XO laptop is designed and developed collaboratively by experts from the academe and IT industry. So, if you are a software developer and have the passion and idea that you think would be beneficial to the children of the world write us help AT laptop dot org or explore the possibility of contributing on this endeavor visit the contributors program.

What are the things that you can do with this XO. There’s a lot of activities as learners…you can surf the web, read an online books, share anything to your neighborhood thru a mesh connection, you can play different activities like the turtle art, etoys and the tam tam and create video and take picture through a built in camera on the XO machine.

If you want to try, Sugar activities it’s now available for Windows or Macintosh user.

I’m currently working with some guys in the Philippines to do an outreach program to teach kids using this XO machine. If you’re interested to take part leave me a comment. Thanks.

XO in action!

One Laptop Per Child? How is this possible?!!!

Few weeks ago … I had a chance to explore laptop.org from an email and finally join their support-team. This organization reminded me of our SFC service Gawad Kalinga (To give care)which give homes and care to the homeless. The OLPC (One laptop per child)organization is also a non-profit organization which I believed will open doors to many young kids around the world…in which they’ll have a chance to gain new skills and perspective.

This was so timely for me, I was really looking for something productive to spend my time with, on the other hand it’s with my interest and also, to where I can use my experience both in the academe and Information Technology. Truly the evolution of learning now is way too far compare when I was just starting to learn. The techno era and culture now brings so much opportunities for children to learn more and help them to think out of the box, not only that they have a chance to collaborate with out spending much or going anywhere. In which, the way laptop.org’s mission caught my attention, I always believe in service, learning and technology. I’m fascinated how people now unselfishly share their time, talents and work collaboratively for a cause. OLPC (One Laptop per Child) uses Open Source software and have a tremendous community that supports its program and projects. I’ve always been fascinated by people who are engaged in this kind of activity — where in they share and strengthen the capacity of different people through their unique talents and experiences.

What’s in the XO laptop? A full of spectrum of activities and knowledge! That will bring a new perspective to every child in a developing country.

I’m excited to this new service and opportunity!

Everyone is welcome to participate!