(Disclaimer: Please be patient with my English. I'm open to suggestions for improvement )

Last week, the Ministry of Education of Colombia held the National Forum on the Pertinence of Education. This is an annual event focused on a different area each year. Given that 2009 was declared the "Year of education for innovation and competitiveness", there was a discussion around things that make education pertinent, and an interest in presenting innovative experiences.

As part of this event, I wanted to organize a TEDx session, but as it turned out, TED requires TEDx events to be independent from any other event. This is unfortunate (and I really think it must be reconsidered), because in many places (at least, in our case) the purpose is not to use TED's brand to get people to come to some event (on its own, our Forum congregates over 1500 teachers from all over the country), but to spread ideas included in TEDTalks. So, bottom line, I can't use the TEDx name, even if I'm using TEDTalks and I want to recognize that.

This situation (and a look to the Forum agenda) made me think about the need to give participants a place to talk about what was being discussed at the Forum. There were a lot of presentations, expert panels, and not enough time to bring those discussions to the context of every person. So I decided to change my approach.

My initial idea around the TEDx session was to have 2-3 sessions, 1.5 hours each. I wanted to have local presenters and several TEDTalks per session, related to global issues. However, most TEDx events are based on an auditorium format, which is not very useful for discussion. Happily, I could take advantage of a large space we would be using during the Forum to do an EduCamp workshop, so I decided to put more focus on conversation and less on presentation.

Enter the World Café, which ideas I had use in the past. Our new design included two sessions: The first one called Reboot and the second, Engage (which, by the way, were the names of the first and last sessions of TED2009).

The first session was devoted to think about the way global issues reflect on our context, and to try and find the critical issues at hand. As a conversation starter, we used talks by Al Gore, Charles Moore and Arthur Benjamin. Because of the setting, we decided to limit the time of talks, because it would be quite difficult to capture people's attention for too long. So all the talks would not last more than 20 minutes. After this, we had a one-hour Café session, with 3 rounds.

The second session was devoted to explore concrete ideas/actions that each participant could develop in her own environment, in order to address local effects of global issues. Once again, a TEDTalk (this time by Seth Godin) was used as a conversation starter. Once again, we had a 3-round session.

During each conversation, we had music from different sources playing in the background: TEDTalks, Playing for change (I still have doubts about if it's even legal to play from YouTube) and Kutiman. I mentioned the last two were an example of new and creative ways to create collaboration between people who never met before.

Each participant received a "program" including the different talks and music we would be using, which she could use also to write down the contact info of other participants.

At the end of the session, we reminded everyone that the talks available online and the World Café ideas could be used by them to do these kind of sessions in their own institutions.

Some bad things:

• The time: The session was scheduled on day 2 of the Forum, at 4:00p.m. I think it would had been better on the last day (which was not possible for reasons beyond my control), and earlier in the afternoon. 4:00 was too late for a lot of people and, even worse, there was a delay in the whole event, which meant we started around 4:45. In the end, there were not as many people as we expected (we were expecting 200, 97 arrived). Because of this, some part of the space felt empty.
• The weather: There has been a lot of rain in Bogotá in these days. Last Wednesday was no exception. Around 5:30, it started to rain and the temperature went down. The spacious setting is way too open, so it was really (really) cold for a lot of us. Even with coffee, the rain (and the huge traffic jams that it creates in the city) helped to reduce the amount of people at the end, which at the same time made very difficult to get a good closure.
• Because we had to change the name of the session (we moved to the name EduCafé at last minute), there was a "communication failure", I'd say. It was not that easy to communicate the purpose of the session to some people...

Some interesting things:

• In my experience, I've found that many teachers, when given paper and markers, decide that they are supposed to use the paper to write. Not to draw or doodle, but to write in a clean and organized way. This happens even when they're told about the purpose of the paper on the tables. I wonder if this reflects the way they use those tools in their environments; if so, it's a reason of concern that we have such a strong beliefs about what it means to put thoughts on paper. I had to remind some of them, every now and then, that they were not meant to create organized lists, but to draw and connect ideas. I wonder if we just have a hard time trying to register our ideas visually (and we had no graphic recorder).
• There were some groups (especially one from the Atlantic shore) which had a hard time splitting up. They arrived together (later, also), and it was very difficult to get them to join other tables. I wonder if the group turns into some kind of "safety net", in this case.
• Because of the selected talks, some people concluded that the session had to do with environmental education, even though they were supposed to know in advance about what we would be doing. This was not a problem, though, because this served as a starting point for other kind of discussions.

Some good things:

• The environment was fantastic. I just loved what our support staff did with it, because the first time I saw it, it felt quite gray, quite cold. We even had flowers on each table!
• The conversations were very interesting. I was really happy to see how excited people was about having the chance to finally speak to each other (like I said, this year the event was way too formal), and it was great to see some of the things that came up in the tables.
• TEDTalks are a great discussion starter. Obviously, it depends on the talks you select, but in this case, even some of the staff guys were asking about the talks, which was unexpected. Even though they didn't participate in the discussions, they were engaged enough as to take with them several programs, after we finished.
• At the end of the session, a lot of people expressed their satisfaction with it. For some of them, it was something that helped "to break the mold" of the Forum. We are convinced that, if we had started at, let's say, 2:00p.m, we would have had more people and a richer conversation.

More pictures of this EduCafé:

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

And the slides I used during the session:

I guess we'll have to wait a little bit to see what happens after this, but I'd say it was a very good beginning. I felt sort of like when we did our first EduCamp. A lot of things to improve, a lot of lessons learned and, hopefully, an excuse for people to bring new conversations to their environments. I have to say I just loved the experience!

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As part of my small contribution to this event, I wanted to collect some ideas from people attending the Open Education Conference, and in fact, going around with a camera asking a few questions was one of my purposes there. It was a great opportunity to get some thoughts about a couple of questions: First, is education relevant? Second: If so, how can we make it more relevant?

Clearly, those were ambiguous questions, but that was the idea: To try and get some insight on the views of different people about this, starting with an ill-formed question .
The short time allowed for just eight people to answer this question in OpenEd. Here are those eight answers. As you will see, there are very different approaches to the same thing, but I’d say the whole picture gives a great view of a challenging issue. So, there you go (in the order they were recorded):

Brian Lamb

Sylvia Currie

Gardner Campbell

Leigh Blackall

D'arcy Norman

David Wiley

Stephen Downes

Tony Bates

I have to say there are a lot of people I didn’t get to talk with (the first names in my head are Scott Leslie, Chris Lott, Alec Couros, Dave Cormier, George Siemens, for example), but I would be glad to include here any new ideas about this, and about where that lead us.

Right now I'm in the middle of translating all of this (via DotSub) to Spanish, but I'm having a hard time to get what Leigh says at 1:23-1:28. Any help will be appreciated. UPDATE: Thanks to Gardner for helping with "rhetoric"!

Thanks to each and every one of you, who accepted to answer this question out of the blue!

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This post is meant to talk about the first Spanish Open Course that I get to offer (actually it's the first one, no matter the language ), which came from an invitation by University of La Sabana, in Bogotá. They contacted me a few months ago, inviting me to do a course on their master on educational informatics program. I accepted on one condition: It would have to be open.

So here I am, a few months later, after thinking a lot about its design and discussing it with a few people (I *really* need to learn about creating/designing in public), and obviously getting ideas from the work of people like David Wiley, Alec Couros, George Siemens & Stephen Downes and Leigh Blackall.

The course already have 14 for-credit participants, and about 20 more participants taking it without certification. We have people from Spain, El Salvador, Mexico, Peru and, obviously, most of the participants are from Colombia.

For now, I'll talk about the technology I'm using, because I think maybe it could be useful to someone, and also it would be great to get feedback on it. There are two things I wanted to achieve with technology: First, I wanted to do something that could be replicated by each participant (which means only non-paid tools and no hosting); second, I wanted to facilitate access to people who are heavy e-mail users. Also, no walled gardens but a public approach (bye bye Moodle), trying to get participants to work on their own personal learning environments throughout the course.

So this is a view of the things I'm using. Detailed info below:

Participants are asked to create a blog on any available service. It is suggested to find for ways to do e-mail publishing, so they don't have to go to any website or use any additional tool.

Once the participant has a blog, she has to register it in the course wiki, which has a Google Docs form embedded. They have to include in their registration the RSS feed for their blog.

The GDocs document is then plugged into Yahoo Pipes via a CSV output. The pipe gets all the feeds and create one single feed, which I'm sending to Feedburner. I'm using Feedburner, actually, to create the possibility of an e-mail subscription, and obviously, to get a little control over subscription statistics.

This way, participants think about RSS aggregators only if they want to. They can have an e-mail subscription, which sends a daily message with a compilation of the posts compiled by the pipe during the previous day.

I'm getting the final RSS feed and I send it to twitter via twitterfeed. There's an user (elrn09) which publishes this feed and also the things compiled in a Diigo group created for the course.

There's also a Google group created, which is not being very popular at the time. I kind of understand this, because participants are not necessarily heavy Internet users, so even creating a blog can seem a daunting task for some of them.

Some interesting thing about this:

• The pipe (a very simple one, actually) can get input from any set of RSS feeds (For example, I thought at some point about asking people to get Google Reader accounts and then sharing the posts they found interesting. I could get all the RSS feeds from those Shared items pages, and change the pipe to find the "most read" items in the course. Of course, this faces the problem of getting valuable items lost if they are not shared enough times. In the end, I decided it would be a new layer of complexity for most participants, so I forgot about it)
• After setting up their blog and subscribing to the feedburner feed, people can go back to use the tools they're used to (I'm guessing e-mail is a weapon of choice for most of the participants), both to publish and consume information from the course.
• I "cloned" the whole set-up for another course I was starting, and it was a reasonably quick process. So it is easily replicable.

Some limitations, and things that I'm still trying to figure out:

• How do I analyze all the data coming out of the course? If I wanted to see the progress/evolution of different participants, what kind of tools should I use? Is it possible to do it with the pipe I have now?
• Feedburner is not flexible enough with the mail subscriptions. I'd like every participant to decide whether she gets a daily or real time notification.
• I can't do something like the CCK09 Daily, where some items get to be commented before reaching the participants. That would be nice.

So far, so good. During the first week, I had to keep looking at the feeds that were registered, because some participants would write their blog URL, not the feed URL. Also, some of them registered feeds from existing blogs, so I had to suggest them to label their posts, in order to retrieve just those entries. To "keep clean" the feed, I had to go every now and then and update the source for the pipe, extending the cell range to include the URLs that had been verified already. Some maintenance work that can't be avoided, I guess.

But after that, everything works perfectly. I guess a OPML file could be generated (and it would help later with analytics, definitely), but so far is something I don't think participants are really needing...

Anyway, I have to confess that I still need to understand much better the way Pipes works. I feel that I'm missing a lot of interesting things that could be done, because of my limited knowledge. However, I'm happy because it looks like it works!

Later, some thoughts about the way the course goes. Definitely, there are a lot of limitations created by our context, and the level of actual use of several technologies that seem common-place in other countries. I'll get to learn a lot about what's possible and what kind of things can be done to make these kind of experiences good learning opportunities.

We'll see how it goes!

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1. What you would “bring” to the conference? What can you contribute?
    
   Well, I have an already accepted proposal, so based on that I'll say that my contribution is the story of an experiment that we have done with about 700 higher education teachers, that has started to go mildly viral . The interesting thing about this experience is that it goes beyond the mere discourse about Learning Objects or OER, exposing participants to a connected/connective learning experience. I'd say it can be a valuable demonstration (that, of course, we expect to improve with the feedback from the attendees) of how can we 'walk the talk' regarding the use of technology in our daily practice.
    
   Something else: In the past, I've had some experience reporting events like this in Spanish, so that's something else I will do during the conference. You can expect me to provide information related to OpenEd to the Spanish-speaking community, both via Twitter and my blog. I also expect to be around with a video camera, asking participants about their thoughts on the pertinence of education. That's the general subject of a national forum that the Colombian Ministry of Education will have in October, so I intend to collect and publish online the ideas and thoughts of people around the world, to enrich our own perspective on this critical issue.
    
   I think of myself as sort of a "bridge builder"... I'm convinced of the importance of helping non-English speakers to get access to many current discussions that have a huge impact on the way we think about learning and the role of education, so I think that attending OpenEd will be, for me, a good opportunity to help bringing a lot of different and interesting ideas to an educational community that can make good use of them.  
 

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?
    
   This has to do with something else that I'll definitely bring to the conference: lots of questions. The OER / Open Education movement is just starting in my country, and there are a lot of issues that we'll be able to address through the participation in this conference. For example, since 2006, we have a national work in progress around LO (that I helped to design), so we are facing the usual problems related to sharing resources among institutions, and how to use them in an effective way in teacher's practices. I think OpenEd will a good opportunity to enrich our current approach to this subject.

   Now, on the other hand, I think Open Education (in general) has a huge potential to improve the way we think about both teaching and formal education. I believe that the possibility of getting first-hand knowledge about the issues faced by institutions and new initiatives around the world could be useful to build a strong case for Open Education in a country like Colombia, helping us to go beyond the mere content approach, to explore the political and economical issues involved.

   Finally, it won't be fair to end this without saying that going to OpenEd is, clearly, a fantastic opportunity to meet a lot of people that I have read over the years, who have helped me change the way I see the world. I'll be really honored to be there.

So, that's it. That's my reflection about the things I can bring to OpenEd, and the things I expect to learn about. I hope it makes some sense…!

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To all of you, I'd like to wish Happy Holidays and a great 2009. I think we, as a species, do have a huge challenge in the years to come, so 2009 is a good excuse to keep changing our world.

A small "homemade" message, built on the work of so many others (I really suggest you to download it, because it looks way better. Slideshare still has a few things to improve):

I hope to discover, with you, new ways to improve our world, and to keep learning just like I did this year.

Thank you everyone for making 2008 a year even more memorable than the last one!

Happy Holidays!

Starting an idea

The workshop in Bogota was the first one we did. With logistical support from CINTEL (the most important telecommunication research center in our country), we found a space designed for mass gatherings (called Logyk, if I remember correctly), where we arranged things to carry out the experiment.

After conducting several meetings with the entire CINTEL and MoE (Ministry of Education) teams, explaining in detail what we wanted to do, and showing how part of the challenge was to achieve a very open and informal (which, incidentally, was so uncommon as stimulating for all of us), we got to the day before the event (Tuesday, December 4 2007). While the staff members were putting on place tables, chairs and computers (all these hired by MoE with support from CINTEL), my previous work was to meet with Stephen and a group of students who would help us to coordinate the workshop the next day (all of them selected by CINTEL).

These students were supposed to be "catalysts" for the activity of over-the-shoulder learning. In the first meetings, we wondered what would happen if among the participants, we could not find users of any of the proposed tools. This made us consider the importance of having some knowledgeable users to start the activity. And here began the surprises. My initial assumption was that these students would have knowledge of the tools selected (by completing a total of 10) because, after all, they are "digital natives". The fact was that most of these tools were unknown to them too, although they had much experience in handling some of them (the most "social" ones).

Photo: Stephen Downes

The meeting was little more than a short description of what was supposed to happen the next day, in an atmosphere much more formal that I would have liked (a roundtable). I think this was caused, in part, by our own ignorance about what would happen. Meanwhile, staff were setting up the room where we would have the initial conference, placing tables and chairs in neat rows, in a traditional lecture format.

Putting on the t-shirt

Next morning, the registration started very early, and one of the big surprises for the participant were the white t-shirts we were giving them. Stephen and MoE staff (myself included) would have black t-shirts. The support students were dressed in red ones. The other participants would receive a white one. The t-shirt fulfilled two functions: first, to make easy for participants to tag themselves (in a previous meeting, someone suggested that people dressed with special clothing would be completely unwilling to stick adhesives to it); second, this simple garment helped to generate a sense of identity.

After many greetings and reunions with old acquaintances, and a reasonably informal atmosphere, we started the workshop.

First, a short presentation by me, talking about the structure of the National Program on Media and ICT Use (named that way at that time) and sharing with the audience what was going to happen throughout the day (IMPORTANT: This presentation is about one year old. Many things changed on the structure of the program on these months):

For those who do not want to watch the presentation, I want to highlight some "Game Rules" we defined at the beginning:

     * Upon arrival, be prepared to share with other participants.
     * When you leave, be prepared to share with the world.
     * We are all learners.
     * No one is a tourist.
     * Whatever happens is the only thing that could have happened.

For me, the last one is perhaps the most important of all, and I think it speaks of something that also appeared in CCK08: It is not possible for one person to learn everything, or consume all the information produced by a large group of people . That is the world we live in. So we need to understand that we can only do what is within our reach, and that whatever that is, it is fine. Very philosophical.

Then came Stephen's talk, which was intended to provide a conceptual framework for the activities of the day:

Foto: Stephen Downes

As usual, Stephen caught the attention of the audience (not just of those who understood English, but everyone, thanks to the excellent work of the interpreters who supported the event). An interesting aspect of each person having his own computer, was discovering how many of them sought ways to record their ideas on the conference,whether by taking notes online, or using text processors and then emailing the files the themselves. (Tip: It is important to identify ways in which all participants can benefit from these notes, which we did not this first time).

After this talk, we started our work. The first thing we proposed to the participants was to draw their personal learning environment (PLE), and then start a process of peer learning (because everyone had a laptop), where everyone was expected to be both learner and teacher at the same time. The first part might not have had the impact we wanted, because I realized too late the need to expand a bit more what Stephen had mentioned on the PLE concept, and the only example I had at hand was a very raw diagram I made by hand before the workshop. (Tip: For this year, the ideas on PLE have matured a lot more. We have new elements to help participants make sense of their PLEs).

Once they made explicit which tools they used in their PLE, they would have to write down each tool in an adhesive label (that is, a tag) and put it on their t-shirt. Those labels would represent those things they knew about, those things they could teach about. They were asked to identify the tools they would like to know more about (we gave them a "tool sheet" including descriptions and URL of several tools, in 13 categories), and their mission was to find someone tagged with the tool they wanted to learn about, and ask that person to teach them about it.

With some initial diagrams, and the excuse of a coffee break in the middle of the morning, participants addressed the second part of the job, now with a much more informal atmosphere (tables and chairs were unorganized, and many people were on the space outside the auditorium, where more comfortable couches and sofas could be found). The only real requirement for this activity was a working Internet connection, for it was here where would be the greatest burden for the network. That was the only thing that was not supposed to fail.

Murphy's law

I think I heard the statement "If something can go wrong, it will" about 15 years ago, and since then (and with the multitude of paragraphs and corollaries added to it) I keep it in mind as a reminder of how those things we don't want to happen are the ones set to occur more frequently. In the case of the workshop, the only thing that shouldn't have failed, connectivity, failed. The wireless routers that were in place could not endure the burden of all users and collapsed one after another, leaving only a very small group of people online. The flaw was visible only when usage of the access points became intense (because initially, because we were in lecture mode, there were not many people using the network services). This left us in a situation quite difficult during the rest of the morning. The only solution to the problem was getting new routers, which only would come around noon.

Something that comes back to my mind, is that this incident created some tension between the organizers (including myself), because even though the response I received was "the network is not down" (which was absolutely correct from a technical point of view), the experience for everyone else was of a lousy network connection (which was unfair, given that we hired 20Mb for the day).

Photo: elearningcolombia

This situation reminds me of past situations in which engineers, ignoring completely the experience being lived by those who do not know about technical issues (and are not interested, also), try to explain that the experience they are living is not correct, and that almost everything is "running". I suppose it is a matter of empathy, and maybe it is learned best over the years ...

Anyway, participants were engaged against all odds and tried to perform the proposed tasks. All I could do was to say everyone that what we were living was something that could happen all the time, and that it was one of the challenges that we had to confront as teachers. However, it was clear to everyone that this affected the achievement of our objectives (this was expressed in the survey done after the workshop), as some of them said via Ustream:

We all tried and did our best to compensate for the situation. The students sat close to those with connectivity to support the participants. Me, I ended up sitting on the floor trying to explain the workings of a wiki using sheets of paper, taking ideas from the videos of CommonCraft. Some of them who managed to complete the mission, left traces of it on YouTube:

So, it was noon, and we went to lunch. Just before we left, the connectivity problem was solved, which led us to alter the schedule we had planned.

Plan B

Despite of everything that happened, the balance was positive at noon. Participants were very engaged and just the messy environment was for many of them a remarkable thing. But we were faced with a real problem: very few people had the opportunity to experience throughout the morning with the tools we had anticipated. There were a lot of conversations, but there wasn't that much exploration. That left us in a difficult situation for the first activity of the afternoon (which intended to collect ideas on possible ways to use the tools). For this reason, we decided to change our plan on the fly, and use the work tables in the afternoon as "demonstration stations", in which students were asked to talk about the functionality and ways to use some of the tools.

This was a case in which the idea of "Whatever happens is the only thing that could have happened" became true, even for us as organizers. And we faced the need to relax and accept that we would not achieve what we had initially imagined, but something different. Not better or worse, just different.

But this unexpected change, made on the fly, was also appreciated by some of the participants:

(This teacher talks about how recursive we were to change things and try to get them to see what they couldn't see in the morning. He's nice enough as to say that this was a "dynamic solution created on the fly")

However, not everything was perfect. We never thought the students would have to be in charge of "demonstration stations", so some of them (without liability on their part) did not have an adequate mastery of the tool they had to face. This meant that, for example, those who showed Facebook were able to show the participants what could be done with the tool, whereas there were cases (like Twitter, for example) in which for obvious reasons this activity was not so helpful. However, the situation was a great lesson who would use two days later, in Medellin.

While all this was happening, we were streaming (and recording) using Ustream. We had a video feed showed in one of the two plasma TVs we had in the room, while the other (which was outside the auditorium) was frankly underused.

The change in the dynamics meant that the activity that was planned for the beginning of the afternoon disappeared completely from the schedule. And instead of delaying everything, we continued with the rest of the agenda as we planned initially.

Our unconference

We prepared a large "board" with two half-hour slots and five tables for each slot, to complete a total of 10 possible discussions. We invite attendees to propose their topics of discussion and to sit down on the tables according to the number assigned to the discussion, and according to their own interests. The game rule here was: "If you are not learning or taking part in a discussion, please move to another one", to remind everyone that it was not required to stay in a place where they did not feel they should be.

Discussions proceeded without any problem, and then came the moment for every discussion leader to share their conclusions with the whole group. Curiously, this activity started to become kind of boring, not only because of the time (it was already 5p.m.), but because of the extent to which some participants took their points. Adding up the fact that we had 10 discussions, the discussion became longer than we would have liked it to be.

With this activity, we ended the first workshop. Due to accumulated fatigue throughout the day, we did not held a long meeting after that, but hardly discussed the critical aspects to be taken into account in Medellin, which became important lessons.

Lessons learned

• Perhaps the first one is the importance of connectivity, and the need of having a plan B to make activities possible.
• The flexibility in design and objectives is crucial. The building of enough confidence as to propose a change on the road is essential, and in fact constitutes a message about the use of technology: We need to change our actions depending on the context that we have around us.
• The people of CINTEL proposed to play a little more with the room layout in Medellin, because we would have some space constraints. In Bogota, people left the auditorium after Stephen's conference (as there was a sort of lobby outside), which allowed us to reorganize tables and alter the space. We would not be able to do this in Medellín, so their proposal was to have a more informal atmosphere since the beginning. This messy space was, curiously, rather well received by many of the participants.
• We could not make assumptions about the ability of the support students in handling the tools. We would have to do something about this situation, before the second workshop.
• It was neccesary to limit the time for the final group discussion.

To finish, some opinions of the participants:

Two days later, we would have our second "trail": Medellin.

NOTE: Please let me know about mistakes and possible improvements in this writing. I tried to do a close translation of an Spanish post, so it may seem a little "funny" every now and then.

Related posts

• Educamp Colombia

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The second and third posts will be devoted to show a little of what happened in Bogotá and Medellín, respectively. The last one will contain some lessons learned and a sort of "toolbox" and suggestions, if you want to embark on an adventure of this sort on your own.

It is worth saying that it may pass some time to get to complete the four posts. However, I promised Stephen a long time ago to write in English about this, so it's a commitment that I really want to honor.

With that said, let's get started!

The idea of the workshops came a Saturday afternoon in Bogota (August 2007), while talking to Nancy White, Jay Cross and Fernando, a day after we finished the International Seminar on E-Learning Quality we organized back then, in which we had them as guest speakers.

Nancy mentioned that, while taking notes during the event (Nancy is a person incredibly efficient to take notes!) and reporting online what was happening , Ulf (Ulf-Daniel Ehlers, another of the guest speakers) asked about some of the tools she was using. She explained to him, and then Ulf did the same with Virginie (another guest speaker), who was sitting next to him.

This little situation was quite appealing to Nancy so, later, we ended up discussing how to organize an experience meant to foster "over-the-shoulder" learning. The ideas discussed were meant to turn into something "concrete" that what we often do with our colleagues (and even perfect strangers), when we read the newspaper of someone sitting next to us, or when we ask for help to someone sitting in the next chair in our office. In fact, this is a very common practice among programmers, for example, who share tips and solutions while working on the same computer room...

We saw that, if we wanted such an experiment to be successful, we would need each participant to have his own computer and, taking into account the intense use that both Nancy and Jay make of online tools, we would need a good Internet connection.

Back then, through my feeds I had already heard about Pecha Kucha and some of the BarCamps and PodCamps made in the United States and Europe, and about the experimental traveling unconference made in New Zealand in early 2007. I discussed about it with Jay and Nancy, and I started to see the huge importance of designing an event in which, to reproduce what I heard from Nancy and Stephen repeatedly, we could model practices of collaboration between perfect strangers, in an environment that would allow them to discover that we all can be teachers and learners at the same time.

To keep this short, in the following months I got more info about some of the various alternatives available in the unconference world (including, let's say, the OpenSpace technology and the World Café), and I started to design the overall narrative for the event.

The design document, which served as a guide to the activities of the workshop, can be found in my wiki (in Spanish only). From a static document (as released in December 2007), my wish is that it becomes a support to organizers and facilitators of this type of activity, so that's why it is a wiki right now.

As in so many other things, I have to say that the confidence that Claudia Zea and Maria Victoria Angulo gave me to launch these workshops was priceless, as well as the support of my team at the Ministry of Education (Gloria James, Karen Caceres and Francisco Suarez). The support offered by CINTEL to put in place all the logistics is equally priceless. And last but not least, the decision of Stephen Downes to join us in this new adventure was invaluable. Now, I would not say it was unexpected, because Stephen is someone with a very open mind to undertake this kind of thing, but I think it was very fortunate, because the date of the workshops matched a small space in his agenda, which allowed him to join us in Bogotá and Medellín.

Now, one may wonder why Stephen Downes and not any other speaker. The workshop is built on a background related not only to collaborative learning, but relies on concepts such as connectivism, personal learning environments and, ultimately, has to do with the possibility that each learner should have of discovering his interests (and eventually explore them with the support of technology), beyond a curriculum or some pre-defined learning goals.

During my time at the Ministry and through the inmersion I had in the blogosphere, I discovered that Downes is one of those people who not only preaches about technology, nor talks about its potential, but he takes time not only to use it, but to share, create and experiment with it. But it was not only a matter of technology. Stephen is also at the center of discussions about connectivism, e-learning and personal learning environments. That, added to the previous visits he did to Colombia, and his knowledge about the things we wanted to do, made him the best person to deliver a lecture to give some context about what we wanted to do in the workshop.

Both Nancy and Stephen, as well as Fernando and some other people, were key in debugging the initial design ideas and building the workshop narrative. To all of them my gratitude for the time they devoted to this.

So, to make a long story short, I'd like to invite you to review the wiki (that is, if you can read Spanish… I'll have to do something about that), to express your comments (good or bad) about the design (if there are any readers here who made part of it), and to join me in the report of what happened in Bogotá and Medellín.

A excepción de que se indique lo contrario, este contenido está publicado bajo una licencia Creative Commons.

I'm having a very hard time trying to get back on track with my CCK08 course. I've been reading as much as possible, but my participation rate fell down dramatically after the first weeks. Too many things going on at the same time.

Of course, this leaves the question of "How do I go back in?" Should I write posts for every week? Should I try and get hold of all the information possible as fast as I can? How can I say something (that is, write something) if I didn't participate in the last weeks? What should I do?!?!?!?!?

Then, I remembered what Stephen and George said at the beginning of the course: No one will be able to read all the information produced. On the other hand, given that this is about my learning (and the universe has a way to make things perfect), everything that got in my way in the last few weeks has something to do with all the issues discussed in CCK08. In fact, I've been kind of living some of those issues. For the last few months I've been a student at UFRJ (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro), and I've had the chance to see firsthand some interesting things related to power in the classroom, instructional design (or the lack of it) and groups, networks and communities (and some of the invisible barriers that might hinder their development). Lots of things to think about.

But this week I had the chance to come back again to the Elluminate sessions, this time with Nancy White as our weekly guest. It was a very interesting session, I took a few notes, and after organizing them a little bit, I decided that this was as good as any other excuse to write again about the course.