Lecturing - November 30th

Last week I went to Rio de Janeiro to give two lectures about Wikis and its uses in Primary and Secondary Education. I went to share my experience during this year. Until february this year, I had never worked in blogs, wikis or anything beyond MSN Messenger and basic internet search engines.

But it took only a few weeks of basic training, institutional support and self-learning to become the ICT Coordinator at my school.

Going to Rio helped me realize that even though I have the possibility to communicate with anybody in the world in real-time through Plurk, Twitter, or receive the information in a matter of minutes after it was published in any part of the world through bloglines; not everybody does it.

Part because their technological immersion is still in the rise, or because the need to do it has not reached them yet. It reached me quickly, and even though I will never stop learning I feel happy to be part of the educational technology world team, because the distances in a global community are reduces with one or two clicks.

Reading and Writing in the 21st Century

Learning to read and write are two of the most fundamental skills in humans. That's basically what differentiates us from the other superior animals. Although if you listen to many people talking or reading, it seems as if they didn't alphabetize at all.
Those two basic skills have been suffering changes in response to the changing technology in today's world.

The internet meant a whole new way of communication with people as general public, consumers, students and laymen. Advertising campaigns had to be modified to fit the format of small space and quick seconds-long ads from any brand or product in order to be published and targeted to specific audiences.

As any emerging technology, the internet had a great impact in children, teenagers and young adults. It is not a surprise that advertising in the internet was not different from the tv major campaigns. Even though it was an uncertain year or in the nineties when the internet got popular, it has consiolidated as a completely new way of doing business and shopping. It's not necessary to be hooked up to QVC or any other shopping channel, you could access to any brand with a website at anytime, from any part of the world.

And then came the Web 2.0, a brand new way to generate information. Anybody can contribute and/or publish anything, from family events to professional education. These technologies also require a new set of skills and styles of presentation of information. Because we read and write in different ways nowadays. It is actually not bad to write a lot through a computer, because you have the capabilities of instantaneous editing and improvement, instead of drawing scratches over paper, and pretend to move words with arrows from one position to another. The cherry on top is the fact that we pollute less and we help saving our planet.

And these days you can also read with your ears, yes. Thanks to audiobooks and podcasting, you can take lots of information in a simple mp3 player anywhere with you. So, everytime you're riding a bus, train or airplane, don't waste your time, learn something new by e-writing and e-reading (via audio or visual publications).

eWaste - November 12th

As much as technology help us progressing: Those of us who have access to: tv, cable, wireless phones, mobile phones, and computers are avid users of technology.
But, where do we dump our technology trash or waste. At the current rate, the life span of a mobile phone is between 6 and 12 months, a computer's 12 to 18 months, and so on, just to name a few of the most popular ones.
Unfortunately eWaste is discarded in dumping places in countries such as China, and many poor countries located in latinamerica, to mention some.

Let's watch this video and think twice before we want to change our mobile phone just because the new "in" model comes out.


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The Future - November 2nd

I stumbled upon this conference about the future of media. Even though it's a long video, it is certainloy interesting to hear Gerd Leonhard, a known futurist, talking about Web 2.0 as our current future..... or present?