Learning, Freedom and the Web/The Book

This is a December 6th snapshot of the outline for the Learning, Freedom and the Web book under development by the Drumbeat community. It was presented on the Drumbeat community call on December 6th, Please use this wiki's discussion page or join the Monday calls to weigh in.

Learning, Freedom and the Web is a substantial, 120 page document, stuffed with words, infographics and photos. To be completed by February 2011. To be Released under CC-BY license as an e-Book (PDF), print-on-demand (Lulu) and possibly a limited print run.

FOREWORD

by Mark Surman

INTRO to Learning, Freedom and the Web

by Anya Kamenetz

3500 words. Establishes the major themes, concepts, and the argument we're making about why this stuff is important and why now.

A DAY IN THE LIFE

of Drumbeat. several page photo spread.

(24 hour "tick-tock" feature maybe spreading across several time zones, including the festival as well as stuff in North America, an impressionistic yet precise record of sculpture mobs, city-as-classroom, robot building, cafe-con-leche-fueled coding sprints, Gunner-style love bombing, intense Post-it-note discussion sessions, keynote speeches, tapas binges, late night dancing.)

PEOPLE and PROJECTS

needs a unifying theme.

or, FACES and SPACES/ A Drumbeat Alphabet/ Drumbeat Primer/ Drumbeat Rainbow?/ Drumbeat Planets? body of the document ~ 100 pages.

Or, if you don’t like the alphabet, we could also do 4 SECTIONS:

Learning & Freedom --Storming the Academy, Badges, Local Learning the Web & Learning --Open Content, P2PU Freedom & the Web-- Open Video, Hacking, Freedom/Future

Or we could simply separate them by color (Rainbow) or images of planets in a solar system (Drumbeat Planets/ Drumbeat Universe)

Eight sections will each explore a major theme of the festival in words and pictures. They will include PROJECT descriptions where appropriate to get a sense of this as a community of doers and not just talkers. Each theme also has several associated PEOPLE.

PEOPLE are a series of 500-750 word profiles that capture this community, the passions, the idiosyncrasies. A means of hitting the major themes again as people repeat them in their interviews, and of drawing in the larger context of why this stuff is important as people give their varied backgrounds and perspectives.

This section will be threaded through with EPHEMERA Tweets, snippets of blog posts, tag clouds, data visualizations, etc.

A is for Academy-Storming “Joyful insurgency” techniques and tactics from established professors for taking on the academy from inside.

PEOPLE (subject to change)

   Cathy Davidson-HASTAC
   Jade Davis- FutureClass
   Francois Taddei -Research evolutionary biologist, INSERM and organizer TED X WIserU
   Ismael Pena-Lopez - Open University of Catalunya

mini-projects: Minority Voices in the Cloud & Crowd, The Classroom Organizer, Classroom Attention Barometer. mini-project: Teaching with Wikipedia.

B is for Badges Badges= Assessment for informal/authentic/peer-based/practical learning. Cracking assessment is the next major frontier of the open learning revolution. PEOPLE:

  Joshua Gay -Textbook Revolution
   David Humphrey -Seneca College
   

projects: P2PU Badges/Badge Backpack

C is for CC and other open Content Creative Commons licenses provide the intellectual and practical framework for a world of unlimited learning resources. Open content is historically ground zero of learning, freedom and the web.

 PEOPLE: 
   Joi Ito-CC
   Meena Hwang- OCWC
   David Wiley-Opencontent.org
   Carolina Botero -Creative Commons Colombia
    Brad Felix-Flat World Knowledge 

mini-project: OER /CC attribution generator, a browser and platform plugin that would export the metadata around a CC licensed work to produce a formatted attribution. University of Michigan’s Molly Kleinman and CC’s CTO Nathan Yergler, in collaboration with Mozilla, are working to make this tool a reality.

mini-project: Flat World Knowledge is releasing a new set of tools to greatly increase customizability of their textbooks.

D is for DIY and P2P Do-it-yourself and peer-to-peer are two major modes of learning-by-doing imported from the web world that challenge the old hierarchical structure of education. Can we use them to reinvent web education itself?

    Phillipp Schmidt -P2PU
    Pippa Buchanan -P2PU
   John Britton -P2PU 
   Chris Mills -Opera, OWEA
   Dale Dougherty (?) MAKE

Project: School of Webcraft

E is for Everywhere (local learning) “Local is the new black.” With the help of mobile technology, informal learning leaps the walls of the classroom and shows up in libraries, parks, museums, whereever you are.

     Enric Hidalgo -Free Knowledge Institute
     Jack Martin -NY Public Library
     Jess Klein -New Youth City Learning Network
     Roberta Brandão. Park Libraries (Bibliotecas Parque)

project: X-Ray Vision Power Goggles (XVPG).Taylor Bayless <tbayless@chipublib.org> from YouMEdia and Jack Martin hjmartin@nypl.org from the NYPL are working with Atul Varma from Mozilla and Rafi Santo from Indiana University on an Open Web Widget to get kids excited about learning programming, in the browser.

F is for Future/Freedom Drumbeat is a turning point--an experiment in how technology can empower communities and enable social change on a massive scale.

    Allan Gunn - Aspiration Technology
    Mitchell Baker - Mozilla Foundation
    Hal Plotkin - Department of Education
    Mimi Ito - Macarthur Foundation. 

G-Rated is for Videos Video packs way more info punch than print. And the ubiquity of online video means we all tap into rich (and fast) new learning opportunities constantly. Open, hackable video has untapped potential as a learning resource.

   Nicholas Reville -Universal Subtitles
   Ben Moskowitz -Open Video Alliance
   Brett Gaylor-Filmmaker, RIP; WebMadeMovies
   Gabriel Shalom -filmmaker, The Future of Money

  Project:  Web Made Movies/Universal Subtitles

H is for Hacking

Making things with your hands is one of the best ways to learn by doing.   These DIY hactivists show how programming can escape the screen and move into the public square. 

 Massimo Banzi-Arduino
 Johannes--Hackbus
 Allison Lewis-Switchcraft
 Efraín Foglia-Guifi.net

and so on...