Telecentres, jobs … and movements

Barcelona, Spain. June 19+20. Earlier this week, about 40 people gathered in Barcelona to talk about ‘e-skills and employability’. In many ways, this was a typical telecentre.org meeting. Everyone attending – including host organization Fundación Esplai – was in the business of running telecentres or other community technology projects. The event helped them build new friendships, learn skills and practices from each other and, in some cases, surface opportunities to work together. However, one thing this meeting was different. The common touch point was not just the telecentres, but also a commitment to using technology to help people get jobs or start businesses.

At some level, this focus in the European community tech space is being driven by European Union policy makers and companies like Microsoft and Cisco. These players are ringing bells to say that Europe will be short two million skilled IT workers in coming years, and that filling this gap is key to the economic survival of the continent. As this issue becomes stronger on the policy and corporate radar, NGOs like the ones I met in Barcelona are saying: “… hey, we’ve been working on this for years. We know how to help people get these skills. We can help.”

It seems that this message is being heard, especially by the EU and Microsoft people who were at the event. A new social market is emerging and these community tech NGOs are moving in shape it and take advantage of it. That’s a good thing. However, I don’t think it is the most interesting thing.

What’s more interesting is that almost all the community tech organizations at the Barcelona event saw ‘jobs and employment’ as part of a broader poverty fighting | social justice | empowerment agenda. On day one, we did a spectrogram exercise on the statement ‘eskills is the most important issue that my organization works on’.  The bulk of people ended up on the middle of the line, saying that providing computer skills isn’t simply about helping people get a job. It’s also about creating a sense of confidence, an opportunity for self expression and a chance to shape and bend the world around you. This is what sets computer skills apart.

This holistic perspective is pretty typical of telecentre and community technology people around the world. They are in this game because they believe that offering access to technology offers a way engage people on a broad social change and empowerment agenda. It’s no wonder that some of the best telecentre projects come from large scale, well rooted movement organizations like Sarvodaya and Esplai. In the end, this is a great strength of the telecentre movement … a strength that grounds and deepens the kind of initiatives are likely to emerge around the EU e-skills and employability agenda.

The sad thing – and the thing that was different about the Barcelona event – is that community tech organizations rarely communicate this broader agenda. They sound like they are just pushing access to technology and basic skills. And, when they do, they tend to talk in broad platitudes about things like ‘poverty reduction’. This is neither inspiring nor convincing.

The upside of what’s happening in Europe is that community tech organizations are being forced to think and communicate about themselves in the context of very specific social markets and social change opportunities. Access, training or generalized statements about social impact are no longer enough to justify funding or other kinds of support. However, bringing 10+ years of socially focused tech service delivery experience to help Europe address the skills gap (and possibly to radicalize the debate in the process) is a very specific value proposition. It’s likely that these organizations can sustain their relevance for another 10 years if they can deliver on this value.

There is a lesson in this for the global telecentre movement: experienced telecentre organizations have huge potential as platforms for policy makers and corporates who want to reach out to marginalized communities. This in turn has the potential to generating more value for communities and creating new revenue sources for telecentres. Seizing this opportunity is at once a matter of holding on to traditional telecentre movement values while at the same time being clearer and more specific about what these values have to offer to the world. Luckily, seizing this opportunity and communicating more clearly is not something that telecentres need to do alone. That’s the good part of belonging to a global movement.

Open sourcing education

Reflections on the Dubrovnik iSummit Open Ed whirlwind are now settling in. Here’s the picture: there were 25 hardcore open education activists attending the track throughout, with another 25 people flowing in and out from the main summit. We spent three days in a beautiful – albeit boiling hot – building on the Aegean Sea, dreaming up ways to collaboratively build the open education future.

The people who hung for the whole track were from all corners of the world: Australia; Chile; Estonia; Finland; Netherlands; Peru; Poland; South Africa; the United States. Almost everyone in this core group spends the bulk of their time running practical projects applying open source and commons thinking to education. Whether teachers or policy makers or students, they all had a concrete stake in opening up education.

Listening to three days of buzzing conversation, it’s clear that we don’t yet have a good open education ‘map’, or even a clear picture of what it is. However, there is growing amount of energy in this space and some pieces of the map are rapidly making themselves evident. Free text books. Collaborative processes. Volunteering models. Curriculum repositories. Authoring platforms. Licensing approaches. Policy visions. All these things are being articulated and experimented with in multiple places around the world, and all were discussed as a part of the education track at iSummit.

Over the next couple of weeks, University of the Western Cape’s Philip Schmidt and I are going to write up a paper reflecting on the patterns and ideas emerged from the summit. Some of my questions are:

What are we talking about? While we may not have a shared map or definition of open education, the conversations that happened at iSummit offer some interesting foundations. There was clearly a consensus that we are talking about freely available and mixable content by and for educators. And, there was even a pretty broad push for the idea that we are talking about actual changes to how education works, with students more in the driver’s seat. We’ll need to look at the patterns here to see what comes up, and also compare these patterns with the recent John Seely Brown Hewlett paper and a framework from Finland that Philip mentioned. We might also look at the open access Budapest Declaration, which participants at the summit mentioned as an example of what’s needed at this stage in the evolution of open education.

Resources or ecosystems? The term ‘open educational resources’ dominates this space. Yet, at the iSummit, the message over and over again was: It’s about collaboration. It’s about students and teachers. It’s about connections. My gut says that we should starting thinking bigger than just content and resources. A few months back in Cape Town, Jimmy Wales said that Wikipedia is ‘10% technology, and 90% community’. The same math may well apply to open education – the resources are only 10% of the picture. If so, we might need to start talking about open educational ecosystems as our frame of reference, and not just about resources.

How do we work sideways<->out? For better or for worse, the best known open education projects come from the United States, and mostly from big universities. However, there is a ton of emergent work in other countries and from smaller players, many of whom were at iSummit. It’s essential that these emerging players can easily get on radar and into the game. Doing this means consciously embracing a way of working together that is not top down or bottom up, but sideways out. It also means not getting hung up on North vs. South, but rather embracing North/South/East/West/Everywhere engagement from the very beginning. Open source movements give us models for how to facilitate this kind of innovation from the edge. However, actually working this way requires a ton of intention and focus.

Even without solid definitions, it feels like something amazing is happening. The people who were around me at the iSummit – the Delias, Werners, Amys, Neerus, Lisas, Martijns, Steves and Jos of this world – are a part of something bigger than themselves. It may be too early call this a movement, although I don’t think so. Certainly, it is dynamic and fluid as good movements are, with new formations and innovations emerging around every corner. Maybe this fluidity is better described with verbs than with nouns. Maybe it is the open sourcing of education. Hmmm. Philip?

A movement is afoot

Dubrovnik, Croatia

I’ve had a feeling that a movement is afoot for a while. This feeling was confirmed in spades yesterday during Day Zero of the iSummit Open Education Track.

People around the world are working on ways to open source educational materials, and even education itself. But these people rarely connect to swap stories and figure out ways to move their ideas forward. The idea behind the Open Education track is to change this by doing some good ol’ movement building.

Day Zero was a gathering of about 15 people who are involved in real, concrete, already-happening open curricula projects. Almost everyone had a story to tell. Stories of writing free textbooks for South African high school students. Stories of integrating Creative Commons into Australian education policy. Stories of gathering and sharing huge amounts of free educational content. The common threads: a belief that open source curriculum can make education more accessible and an understanding that we still have a long way to go to make large scale, well-used open source curriculum projects practical and workable.

Yesterday also sparked a number of great ideas and questions. Ex-CC exec director Neeru Paharia said: “Universities are selling hope. Hope should be free.” This sparked a whole discussion on the idea of a free virtual university where we control the education. Today’s full scale Open Education Track will give us a chance to dig deeper on ideas like these, and to bring another 30 or so people into the conversation.

Psyched for iCommons education track

It’s great to finally be in Dubrovnik. I am ready for what promises to
be a great iSummit, including an amazing track specifically on open
source education. Gunner’s most recent blurb on the track is …

There is a rich array of burgeoning and compelling creative commons communities. No matter what they focus on — music, science, visual art — these communities offer great promise but are hard to visualize and grab hold of. The idea with the track is that it gives us a chance to map and tease out a very promising movement — the movement for open source educational materials. The track is going to be made of people who are doing (or want to do) real open education experiments on the ground. They are going to tell stories and map out the community in fun and visual ways, and hopefully make some links (and some friends) that can drive their work forward.

I am going to be in the mix both as a Shuttleworth Foundation fellow talking about open ed movement building, and as someone who worked on the telecentre.org Training Commons project. Should be fun. Will report as it unfolds.

For people who are here in Dubrovnik: we really encourage you to come to this track, especially the opening circle and speedgeek on day one. It’ll be the most pre-6pm fun you’ll have all week.