Open source software and open content for education

Together with several colleagues, I recently worked on a project to develop CD-ROMs for schools in Asia-Pacific, full of open source software and open content specifically geared at schools. John T. Denny, Hartfried Schmid and I co-wrote an article for the UNESCO Bangkok newsletter explaining the aims, process and results of this project. Please download the whole newsletter here.

More info available here too.

UNESCO SchoolNet: school collaboration in SE Asia

Early this year I made a move from European Schoolnet to UNESCO SchoolNet in SE Asia. My new project involves managing a network of eight countries: Cambodia, Myanmar, Lao, Vietnam, Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia. The network has been developing ICT-based materials by and for teachers, giving ICT training (both basic skills and ICT pedagogies), encouraging telecollaboration and more. I wrote a full article about it in last month's Digital Learning magazine, and you can download a copy here.

Image copyright: Tinsiri Siribodhi

ICT in education in SE Asia

I recently attended a three day workshop for the launch of the Next Gen project, run by UNESCO in partnership with Microsoft and Cisco. It was an intriguing meeting for many reasons, not only because the project itself is very interesting in that it supports the variety of different needs for improving pre-service teacher training for ICT-based pedagogy, but also because of the common problems faced by many countries. 10 countries took part from Asia-Pacific: India, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Lao, Thailand, China, Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam; they each sent a representative from the Ministry of Education, plus a few representatives of teacher training institutions.

So many countries came back to the problem of infrastructure, being stuck at this basic step before reaching the next level. Lack of understanding of technology, and low capacity in Ministries of Education means that it's very hard for countries to 'leapfrog' technologies, and tend to follow old routes rather than innovating and using newer more effective models.

It really made me wonder why more countries aren't involved in the 100 $ laptop project being run by MIT. The laptops are low powered, and have many limitations, but as an alternative to having no technology at all in schools, surely this is an interesting approach? I noticed only Thailand and India have joined the project so far.

A key problem in ICT for many countries is the lack of electricity supply in many rural areas. So I'm particularly intrigued by the project's wind-up laptops. I also think it's a great way to promote open source technologies, as the laptops run Linux and are likely to include open educational content too. I think this can really be the 'Trojan horse' that so many of us talk about in educational reform - David Cavallo (MIT) has written a great paper on education reform.

A final word on the Next Gen launch workshop: the ladies from the Philippines were extremely impressive. Dr. Vilma Labrador from the MoE particularly so. She was the first person I had seen reminding us of the need to have a heartfelt mission for education, and not just be thinking technically or politically. Not only that, but she did parts of her speech in song. Amazing!

Virtual Online Communities

Still the hottest topic on the web, virtual online communities are developing and changing at a rapid rate. I wrote a paper to describe and discuss them, including best practices and emerging trends.
Download my paper

I previously worked together with the webteam implementing online community tools at one of the world-leading school collaboration organisations, European Schoolnet.

Photo by Under Volcano of an artwork from Footprints Community Art Project, Vancouver, Canada.

Open source, solar powered ICT to bridge the digital divide

Since I've been working in Bangkok, I've been in contact with many people from countries where schools and communities don't have electricity, let alone Internet connections. At the same time, many development agencies are willing to spend on ICT in education, despite the fact that many schools in countries like Afghanistan or Nepal think that lighting or pens are luxuries! Even in the more well off Asian countries like Thailand, villages and rural areas are still very underequipped.

So I'm very excited to come across this project to offer communications systems to rural and remote communities via solar, hydro or even pedal power. A non-profit organisation, Inveneo, from the USA has launched a new system for villages to get a range of different Internet systems.

"The Communications Station is designed for use by end-users in a village home, school, or clinic setting. It provides computing, telephony and Internet access. The Hub Station is designed for use by a network administrator and is located in a regional location. It is used to manage the network and to provide connectivity to data and voice services," says the press release.

Hardware and software design specs and source code

Campaigning through games

An Italian organisation called Molleindustria makes simple but persuasive games to put across a political or social message. I had great fun playing their McDonalds game, a cartoony "sim" style game, where you have to manage McDonalds' value chain. It's obviously strong on agenda, but rather on the ball, and certainly very funny. Obviously, McDonalds is an easy target, but still a valid one (if you haven't seen Supersize Me, then make sure you do). Surprisingly though, there are still some enlightened souls working for McDonalds, like this manager who converted his cars to run on waste oil from his McDonalds outlets!

Update from New Scientist, strangely echoing part of the game:
"Lowing cattle and sterile fields of soya are replacing Amazonian rainforest so fast that 40 per cent of the forest will be gone by 2050, if present trends continue. Even discounting land cleared for the wood itself, deforestation is threatening ecological meltdown in the region." Full article.

Carbon offsetting made easy

The marvellous Ditchmonkey reminded me of this great tool for carbon offsetting. You can use the simple calculator tools to work out how much carbon emissions are caused by daily activities or travel, then buy equivalent carbon credits by donating to the site's projects. The projects are in the area of sustainable forestry, renewable energy and energy efficiency. I just used it to offset the carbon emitted by my last plane trip. A brilliant way to use technology for the environment.

Climate Care website

Beautiful bacteria

Bacteria self-organising on antibiotic petri dishes look incredible. Just another wonderful example of emergence in action.

More pictures from Pruned

Google Earth & GIS

Despite being the originator of World Wind, NASA is now integrating some of it's data sets with Google Earth. As NASA is having it's core scientific research budget cut (thanks to Bush's marvellous idea of putting people on Mars in the near future), it makes sense for it to maximise budget by using a freely available client side tool such as Google Earth. Existing sources of satellite data in GIS format (for example the US Geological Survey data) can be converted into Google Earth's KML format using Arc2Earth (unfortunately it's not free or open source). Here is a step-by-step guide. This data can then be displayed and navigated via Google Earth. Declan Butler, who reported on this issue in Nature (subscribers only) has created some interesting maps of Avian bird flu incidence using this approach.
More information...

Slime-controlled robots

The ever-fascinating New Scientist reports on a Japanese research team's efforts to control robots using biological organisms, in this case, the slime mould. The slime mould was grown on a circuit, plugged into a PC. The PC then relayed the controls to the robot.

"The Physarum polycephalum slime, which naturally shies away from light, controls the robot's movement so that it too keeps out of light and seeks out dark places in which to hide itself."

Read more

How to survive a robot uprising

I got a great gift today! It's a book by Daniel H. Wilson, a researcher at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. It's funny, got great graphics, and explains all kinds of apects of robotics in an entertaining way. He's got his own website here and you can buy the book here.

NASA World Wind

Seeing as I previously posted about Google Earth, I thought I should update with a post about NASA's open source World Wind tool. It's been around longer than Google Earth I believe, and has a lot more scientific focus - and it even includes the Moon! There are some great features looking at natural disasters, loading in real satellite pictures of cloud cover, simulating albedo changes and much more. The screenshot shows Hurricane Kate in 2003. I particularly enjoyed the Astrobiology Field Guide, which shows landmarks around the world where biologists have found life in unlikely places. The landmarks link to information pages on the NASA site explaining their significance.

NASA World Wind website (download the software here too)

Global Monitoring for Environment & Security

The European Commission and European Space Agency are cooperating on this initiative to bring together satellite monitoring systems with improved databases and other information technologies to offer better information on the environment.

I've tried to summarise some of the key points related to the environment from a recent communication about GMES.

GMES will enable stakeholders to monitor all kinds of interesting environmental data: - land cover for prediction and management of floods, forest fires and crop yields, monitoring deforestation, wetlands and other important habitats
- global atmospheric processes and chemistry;
– conditions of the global oceans.

It will also be able to give information on risks associated with fishing, agriculture, industrial activities and maritime transport, including oil spills and ice monitoring.

The areas of GMES that are data and computationally intensive require high performance networks and GRID20-based computing for the essential data mining,
sharing and analysing and visualisation of the results. GEANT might well be the infrastructure used, but I hope that BOINC infrastructures will also be used, as they are cheap and enable public participation in data analysis.

GMES is now regarded as the European contribution to the actions recommended at the World Sustainable Development Summit in Johannesburg. Let's just hope all this environmental data is published openly, so that it's easy for all kinds of people to get access to it. GMES will be operational from 2007.

GMES website
Recent communication on GMES to the European Council and European Parliament (PDF)

4th European Workshop on Evolutionary Music and Art

An interesting conference coming up in Budapest, Hungary on 10-12 April 2006. "The application of Evolutionary Computation (EC) techniques for the development of creative systems is a new, exciting and significant area of research. There is a growing interest in the application of these techniques in fields such as: art and music generation, analysis and interpretation; architecture; and design."

Full info here.

Pleo the robotic dinosaur

Digit news and Future Human Evolution report about a new robotic dinosaur, designed by the creator of Furby. "Pleo runs on a sophisticated operating system termed "LifeOS" by Christopher. Emotions are configured in an artificial intelligence engine using more than 50 algorithms to simulate hormones and sophisticated emotions. Christopher says Pleo has its own distinct personality -- not quite dinosaur, not quite human."

Digital humans

Wired reports that simulated humans are being used to test products. Caterpillar use them to build ergonomic machines. I'm slightly concerned though, as it assumes we know everything about how a human works - I'm not sure we do yet! go

Remote controlled woman

Japanese researchers have pioneered a new steering system that can be applied to other people. By applying a current to the muscle behind the ear, researchers can confuse the inner ear's system for balance and control.

Watch the video
Read the full article at Forbes

Art & Artificial Life International Competition: VIDA 8.0

I just received the call for the VIDA competition. Prize money of 40 000 euros is at stake...

"VIDA 8.0 is the seventh edition of this international competition, created to reward excellence in artistic creativity in the field of artificial life.

In previous editions, prizes have been awarded to autonomous entities able to bring us pleasure (Tickle 2.0, Tickle Salon 5.0), engage us in irrational conversations (Head 3.0) or invade our social space (Cour des Miracles 2.0); virtual ecologies that evolve with user participation (Autopoiesis 3.0, Electric Sheep and Remain in Light 4.0), autonomous systems..."

Go to their site

Filming viral attacks

Wired recently reported about the work of Xiaowei Zhuang, a Chinese woman researching in the USA. She is looking into how viruses attack living cells, using laser-enhanced microscopes to view them.

Read the full story here.

Google Earth

"Google Earth combines satellite imagery, maps and the power of Google Search to put the world's geographic information at your fingertips," explains the Google Earth website. It builds on a combination of mapping, GIS and satellite imagery to build a comprehensive 3d interface that covers the globe. Both useful and frightening at the same time...

Google Earth site