Quality Education in a digital world

Marco Fioretti ([email protected]) November 6th, 2009, Kathmanduhttp://mfioretti.com OLE Assemblyhttp://stop.zona-m.net Some rights reserved

Quality Educationin a digital world

Marco Fiorettihttp://mfioretti.com

http://stop.zona-m.net


In today's world, digital technologies influence everybody's

life so deeply, at all possible levels that:

the knowledge of some basic digital issues and practices

must be part of Quality Education

development and deployment of Quality Education must take

into account the same issues and practices

Abstract

3Marco Fioretti ([email protected]) November 6th, 2009, Kathmanduhttp://mfioretti.com OLE Assemblyhttp://stop.zona-m.net Some rights reserved

Marco Fioretti

Member ofOpenDocument Fellowship (www.opendocumentfellowship.com)

Digistan.org (www.digistan.org)

www.eleutheros.org – a Catholic approach to Information Technology

RULE (Run Up to date Linux Everywhere, www.rule-project.org)

Writer for Linux Journal, Linux Format and other magazines

Webmaster of http://Stop.zona-m.net

Author of the Family Guide to Digital Freedom (http://digifreedom.net)

Home page and main publications: http://mfioretti.com

Author introduction


The real nature of software, file formats and digital

technology

How do they impact or will impact our lives

How they can make the world a better place

How does that impact Quality Education

Agenda


Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and

ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 19, www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/

The basics: human rights


... cultural diversity is as necessary for humankind as biodiversity is for nature. (Art. 1)

It widens the range of options open to everyone; it is one of the roots of development,

understood not simply in terms of economic growth, but also as a means to achieve a

more satisfactory intellectual, emotional, moral and spiritual existence (Art. 3)

Its defense is an ethical imperative, inseparable from respect for human dignity. (Art. 4)

All persons have therefore the right to express themselves and to create and disseminate

their work in the language of their choice, and particularly in their mother tongue; (Art 5)

heritage in all its forms must be preserved, enhanced and handed on to future generations

(Art. 7)

Source: http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0012/001271/127160m.pdf

UNESCO declaration on cultural diversity, 2001


What are these?

The importance of document formats


The importance of document formats (2)

Answer: two Nepali treaties regarding the sale of a piece of land, written on palm-leaf about 450 years ago (www.uni-hamburg.de/ngmcp/gallery_ngmpp_e.html)

But how can we still read them, if we don't know brand, model and design specifications (=source code) of the tools used to write them?

Because the document format is completely known and its specifications are completely separated from those of the tool used to create it!


Basic concepts and definitions

Q: How do we create, access and preserve information?

A: Thanks to three very different things:

Physical Support: the material object containing the information

Data Format: the rules by which the information is encoded on the support

User Interface: the tools used to write and read the data according to the format

almost always, Support, Format and Interface can (and should) be independent from each other


Support, Format, Interface: non electronic example

Interface

+

Any manual writing instrument (don't forget quill and charcoal!)and your eye!

Format

Hyeroglyphs (which could also be written on paper, papyrus, wood...) and the meanings associated to each gliph

Support

The Rosetta Stone,

II Century BC


Support, Format, Interface: analog electronic example

Support Format

Support and format are mixed here: Photograms can only be impressed on a specific type of tape, in a way not usable with other cameras and projectors

Interface

Camera and Projector that are useless with any other tape

NOTE: this is the very popular Super 8mm home movie format, released on the market in 1965 by Eastman Kodak, not widely used since the 1980's


Support, Format, Interface: digital, finally!

Support

Hard drives, floppies, CDROMs, DVDs, Compact Flash drives... usable with different hardware

They all contain the same bits that can represent wildly different types of information: text, images, audio...

Format

CHARACTER ENCODING:

the meaning associated to each bit sequence:

EX: “01000001” means “A”

FILE FORMAT:how each piece of data can and

must be stored and marked:

<style:properties style:columnwidth="1.785cm"/>...

<table:tablecell><text:p>600000</text:p></table:tablecell>

+

Interface

Any software program aware of the file format, regardless of :

the hardware it runs on: x86 or Apple computer, cell phone, DVD player, remote server...

Its license of use


Why is digital information good?

If all conceivable kinds of information (from texts to music, images and 3D models) can be represented as a series of bits

We only need:

ONE class of generic storage devices: bit containers which can change shape and technology without particular problems and are very cheap

ONE (ok, very large...) class of telecom networks, ie bit transporters

And all these data can be preserved or distributed with much less money, time and effort than before!

55 73 65 20 4f 70 65 6e 44 6f 63 75 6d 65 6e 74 21


Software is not a stand-alone industry or set of tools, but something that:

makes every other “physical” economic activity work, from agriculture to space travel

run every service used by humankind, from mere bureaucracy to healthcare, education, tourism, lotteries...

has an exclusive mandate to package and access in digital format every kind of information we need to live

Why are SW and digital technologies so important?


What matters isn't software, but what is done through and thanks to software

Your own civil rights and the quality of your own life heavily depend on how software is used around you(Family Guide to Digital Freedom, http://digifreedom.net)

Why is software relevant?


Secondly, your new car needs not be "compatible" with the cars that your neighbours or co-workers use.

What is that makes software different?

“New and old car in Prishtina Market”www.flickr.com/photos/blandm/297556309/There are some big potential differences for society

between production of software and that of most

material goods: when your car breaks or spare

parts for it go out of production, there is no

retroactive damage.

Your next car won't have to be compatible with

everything you did with the old one: all the

memories of all the trips made with your old car,

all the business relationships built thanks to it,

will still be there.


If a software maker goes bankrupt or simply discontinues a product, instead, it can put out of your reach for good all the files you created with it.

If that's the case, the damages caused through software have one characteristic common, even if in an infinitely less serious way, with those caused by nuclear plants without waste management policies, or by depleted uranium weapons:

It will hurt even people who weren't there when it was used, for a long time after it was used.

Using software in the wrong way, you also limit the freedom of choice of everybody else.

Why and how is software dangerous?


Technology (especially digital) is legislation (derived by C. Einfeldt)

“those who control the code for the software that makes much of the world go round, can control things that might once have been left to various legislatures to control”

Fr J. Fox,SDB, Media and priestly formation today 2009, unpublished

For all these reasons...


Almost all software is used to manage information. It is completely worthless without information to process, store and display

We put up with software to manage data, not the other way around!

Forget copyright! With proprietary file formats (not software)... who controls who can copy a file is not its creator!

M. Fioretti, 2005 www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/focus_format_history

“these [social network] databases that grow through user contributions are the real source of lock-in. Eventually, these guys probably will make their software open source because it won't matter. The value lies in having the data.”

Tim O'Reilly, 2009, http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10264471-16.html

What is really important? Data, of course, not software!


Software is like pens, formats like alphabets: if the alphabet is free, it doesn't matter which pens are used or if their design is proprietary

(to know more about the huge negative impact of proprietary or otherwise unknown file formats, read http://mfioretti.com/how-file-formats-can-be-used-favor-or-hamper-innovation-active-citizenship-and-really-free-markets)

The critical difference between software and formats


Human relationships

Science, culture, history

Environment

Energy

Politics, National Security, Civil Rights

Health

Religion

Education

The impact of software and file formats on our lives


“the ‘digital’ in today’s life is no longer a range of

individual things, anything from digital clocks to

cellphones to computers to..., but a culture, something

which calls upon habits or inculcates habits”.

Fr Julian Fox, SDB, Digital Virtues, http://stores.lulu.com/Bosconet

Software creates (and destroys)culture and lifestyles


Risks of exclusion, isolation, loss of diversity

Internet makes it much easier to find people who already have our same opinions ,meet

only those people and only what we want to see (bostonreview.net/BR34.2/morozov.php)

an African writer writing in Western countries, trying to overcome the fear to not belong

to any place, may adopt a fake identity of “Citizen of the World”, and end up living in

a fictional society, a virtual ghetto (www.author-me.com/nonfiction/ghettoizationafricanlit.htm)

In a world of mass communication there is less of everything but the ten books, movies,

songs and ideas at the top of the charts... Cyberspace will be the end of our species

(M. Crichton, The Lost World )

If Crichton's scenario will become reality it won't be because Internet will be everywhere, but because it will

contain mostly USA English content, which transports USA ideas, norms and culture http://web2.adfl.org/adfl/bulletin/V33N3/333006.htm


Exclusion, again

"Who controls the map controls how people perceive the world"

(Mapping Hacks, O'Reilly)

Mauritius, Seychelles, Senegal e Zimbabwe started existing in Google Maps

only in March 2009 (Source: http://web2fordev.net/component/content/article/1-latest-news/61-google-maps-africa-01)

DoesOLE International

exists less thanOLE Nepal?


“Our youth is becoming increasingly technocratic

[and adopting without thinking the negative models

received just through (digital) technology]”

“[therefore] We should learn how to use and improve

the Web for the sake of culture and enlightenment”

Who is the ex-President who said this?

Quick test about protection of cultural diversity


Answer:

Vladimir Putin, then President, now Prime

Minister of Russia

in a speech at a meeting of the Presidential Council for Culture and Art in the Kremlin,

May 30th, 2007

www.interfax-religion.com/?act=news&div=3125

Protecting cultural diversity is a worldwide need


Format wars: science and engineering

1976: the Viking Lander reaches Mars

2003: "All the programmers had died or left NASA, so the format of the data on the tapes was unreadable. We had to hire students to retype everything from printouts”

Billions of private and public projects (mechanical parts, furniture, buildings, bridges...) are written in the DWG format that only AutoCAD can read without errors.

Question: may that be the only reason why does AutoCAD holds 85% of its market segment?


Format wars: our culture and memories

In 1986 BBC created a digital gallery of photographs, writings and other works.

Only 17 years later, much of this gallery was only usable with customized software and unreliable legacy hardware

The UK National Archives risks "losing years of critical knowledge" as 580 terabytes of data are in file formats no longer commercially available.

“older file formats is a bigger problem than keep reading floppy discs and punch cards... we can only make sure is that it doesn't get any worse."

Quick test:

How many theses written on a computer more than 15 years ago are still readable?

You can download, read and convert all the data you put in Facebook or similar sites, right?


"Who controls the map controls how people perceive the world"

Geographic Information System (GIS) are software systems for creation, correlation,

display and interactive analysis of geography-related data.

GIS link generic data to (or through) real places, making much easier to GIS make it much

easier and less expensive to find how very different, apparently unrelated classes of

events influence each other when they happen close to each other

Format wars: map, or you will be mapped!

Many public organizations (including academic institutions which get big discounts on license prices) demand GIS project

files in the proprietary MXD format that only ESRI software can read “forcing, without a real need, anybody willing to

use other software to manually recreate GIS projects, layer by layer”

This choice is the only reason why very useful, high-quality data created with taxpayer money like the database of

European Drainage networks and associated drainage basins shown in the picture can't even be seen without paying

many hundreds of Euros. Why?


The digital world pollutes. A lot!

in India, 315 millions of computers not properly

recycled released in the environment 550K tons of

lead, 900 of cadmium, and 180 of mercury in 2006"

Computers left turned on even if not used will release

in 2009 as much CO2 as 4 millions cars

American companies waste for this reason about 2.8

billion USD in the same year

In 2020 data centers may become a bigger generator of greenhouse

gases than civil aviation


OK, but how could this be the software's fault???

“Microsoft Vista will send to the landfills tons of hardware perfectly

working, but not powerful enough for that operating system” Source: UK Green Party, www.greenparty.org.uk/news/2851

The electricity used to deliver and then filter spam could power

2.4 millions homes and generates as much greenhouse gas as 3.1

millions cars (in April 2009)

But a great amount of spam is transmitted by computers

running weak operating systems or antivirus software


"Increased use of digital information” is one of the essential prerequisites to build

the Smart Energy Grid that will help lower USA dependence on foreign energy and

fuel job creation.

Source:www.consortiuminfo.org/bulletins/apr09.php#feature

is there any country which doesn't have the same needs?

Efficient energy management


From the Hague Declaration on Digital Rights

Government information, services and resources are increasingly

provided virtually rather than physically;

Freedom of speech and association are increasingly exercised on

line rather than in person;

The Internet and the Web provide an unprecedented avenue to

equality of education and opportunity for all peoples throughout

the world;

Source: www.digistan.org/hague-declaration:en


What about the military?

During the Falkland war, the HMS Sheffield sunk because its defense system identified an Argentine-launched Exocet missile. as friendly since it was in the British arsenal. But no “end user” had been able to check if that software was correct or if/how it could be modified.

The digital technical diagrams of several critical systems of the U.S.S. Nimitz, launched in 1972 and still in pretty good shape......look blurry and have misplaced items on today's computer monitors... because their file format is not completely understood by today's software

Public Administration and National Security

Software saves (or wastes) huge amounts of money

in Italy, during 2007 "costs and inefficiencies in management of paper documents cost from 3 and 5% of GNP, that is between 42 and 70 billions of Euro: digital documents could save from 50/60% (electronic billing, digital-only archives) to 90% (certified electronic mail)"


“After landing in Tehran, the Iranian-American

girl was asked by immigration officers if she has a

Facebook account.

When she said "no", the officers searched for her

name on Facebook and noted down the names of

her Facebook friends.”Source: www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=106535773

Politics, civil rights


“absolutely riveting and thrilling reporting over Twitter by a university

student in Tehran who goes by the moniker Tehran Bureau!!!”

Source:Iran's Twitter Revolution, 06/15/2009

www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=106535773

BUT (according to Morozov, who signaled the “Facebook in Tehran” security check:

“ in my opinion, Iranian authorities decided not to take Facebook

and Twitter down entirely... just because they are useful tools of

intelligence gathering”

Politics, civil rights (2)


Electronic Health Records (EHR): computer files containing the complete medical history, drug records, test results and surgeries of an individual.

Complete and portable EHRs could:

help to greatly reduce paperwork, money and time spent in hospitals and labs, or when moving from one city, health insurances or service provider to another.

save (in the USA only) up to $77 billion every year” Source:www.consortiuminfo.org/bulletins/dec08.php

...but only if all computers can read them, of course!

Efficient Healthcare


Patients could become valuable contributors to their (Electronic) Health Records, which have long been seen as only writeable by professionals

Physicians could actively participate to online patient communities, correcting misperceptions

Source: www.theatlantic.com/doc/200910u/patient-empowerment-healthcare

the capacity of volunteer Community Health Workers (CHWs) to provide quality medical care in Tanzania is increased by mobile phone-based tools that offer guidance and decision support

Example: the system can guide a CHW through a series of questions to assess if a newborn needs to receive emergency care

Source: http://mobileactive.org/lessons-interoperability

Through smart use of ICT in healthcare...


"The technological configuration underlying the Internet has a considerable

bearing on its ethical aspects. Use of the new information technology and

the Internet needs to be informed and guided by a resolute commitment to

the practice of solidarity in the service of the common good."

“With the right to be informed goes the duty to seek information.

Information does not simply occur; it has to be sought. On the other hand,

in order to get it, the man who wants information must have access to the

varied means of social communication.”

Who said this? Richard Stallman?


No, the Catholic Church. Sources:

1) “Ethics in Internet”

2) "Communio et Progressio"

See also on the same theme:

“Free Software's surprising sympathy with Catholic doctrine”

(www.linux.com/articles/49533)

The Eleutheros Manifesto (www.eleutheros.it/documenti/manifesto)

from Eleutheros – A Catholic Approach to Information Technology

Who said that? Richard Stallman?


“the Church's language [about communication still] belongs to a read-only culture... The Church still sees [just another channel] for the 'professionals' to give instruction to passive receivers, instead of offering guidelines for a world where more and more people are using bi-directional media like the Internet”

J. Fox, SDB, Digital Virtues, Lulu.com

“Nowadays, understanding the new technologies is essential for us... We are convinced of this to the point where we are examining possibilities for introducing study of this into academic courses for seminarians and priests”

Cardinal Hummes, Prefect of the Congregation for the Clergy, June 2009

Theme Chosen by Pope Benedict XVI for the 2010 World Communication Day:

"The priest and pastoral ministry in a digital world: New media at the service of the Word."

More on digitalness and (Catholic) religion


Excerpts from “Media and priestly formation today” by J. Fox, SDB, Aug. 2009:

There is a tendency to think of the digital world as simply secular and away from all things spiritual. Challenge number one, I would say, is to redress that tendency.

Software is so malleable and complex.. that it tends to embody a culture's methods, knowledge and philosophies... Software becomes part of catechesis in today's world, since the task laid out by Pope John Paul II is to integrate the Christian message with media culture.

One good side of the [wired] world we live in is that we are more aware than ever of other cultures, and in the broader world of religion, inter-religious dialogue is encouraged and facilitated in our digital culture – and by it.

Again on digitalness and (Catholic) religion


What about education???

This page intentionally left

blank as subject of the final

discussion


How can digital technology

make the world

a better place?


“microprocessors are always and only microprocessors... An

FPGA, instead, becomes whatever hardware you need.”

www.linuxjournal.com/article/10330

Hardware that becomes what you want it to be

Arduino (www.arduino.cc) is a board with embedded

microprocessors that can be built by hand or purchased

preassembled, Open Source software and hardware design

Corollary: design and assembly of custom sophisticated electronics only

requires a few hundred dollars and is accessible to many more people


Disintermediation!

Microformats and (more or less) Semantic Web

raw digital data in formats that are not only open, but also structured enough

that software can recognize, process and correlate them without human help

Everyday example: a phone number or an appointment written into a Web page

in such a way that if you click on them the computer adds that number or

appointment to your agenda

Result: disintermediation!

Reduced dependency from “agents” of all kinds: bureaucrats,

lawyers, unnecessary managers, Google...


Simplicity and openness

less effort, skills, time and courage needed to perform routine task

or find and denounce what's wrong.

Overall, I believe in the power of technology to bring abundance. But it

needs to be the appropriate technology, with some sort of social equity,

and with continual monitoring and feedback about adverse impacts..

Openness is part of getting the least pain from technology and the most

benefit from it.

Paul Fernhout (www.pdfernhout.net)


Open Government and Transparency

Digital technology makes it very

simple and cheap to put online as

many raw public data as possible,

from agricultural statistics to

agency budgets

Having such data online makes it much easier to “watch the watchmen” ie build

"follow the money!" search engines... to display, all in one table, things like

who got money from a public contract, who approved it, all the present and past

relationships among those people

Source: M. Fioretti in 'Open Government', O'Reilly, Jan. 2010


Have documents the world needs to

see?Wikileaks help you safely get

the truth out.

... could become as important a

journalistic tool as the Freedom of

Information Act. Time Magazine

Participation and control (1)

But don't forget to demand openness at the source,

as mentioned in the previous slide!


Naples, May 11, 2009: a man is shot in the middle of the

street. The killer did not wear a mask, but nobody

identifies him,

October 2009: 48 hours after the footage of a security cam

showing the killer is broadcast on TV and from there put

online, the killer is identified and arrested thanks to many

anonymous calls.


According to Roberto Saviano, author of Gomorra, eventually such practices may eliminate the

need to wait for one single, exceptionally courageous, and just as much lonely individual to

denounce crime, as a whole community of normal people may find the courage to do

In other words it t may lower the barrier for common people to fighting organized crime


Citizen Science allows

individual volunteers

or groups to observe,

measure, and

contribute to scientific

environmental studies.


NETWORKED NATURALIST http://urban.cens.ucla.edu/projects/naturalist/

“engaging the public in ecological research: see your data, see how your data fits in with other

people’s data, and see how involved scientists interpret those data — all in real-time”.


Rediscovery of the value of people

Example: rediscovery of value of creative, gifted individuals.

There is no such thing as free quality content, it does take time

and effort to put it together.

Acknowledgment that some services and skills (e.g professional

investigative journalism) are not replaceable, at least in the

short/near term

awareness that machines and software accomplish nothing if not used

to change processes... in ways that satisfy people needs, rather than

matching existing features of software programs


Impacts on Quality Education

What are the consequences of

everything going digital for

Quality Education?

(regardless of when students actually

start using computer themselves)


Duties of Quality Education

Quality Education must include and provide the awareness that:

today it is more worthwhile than ever to learn because:

for the first time in human history, not only there are (in some

countries at least) formal acknowledgments of human rights,

freedom of speech and similar principles...

...but the tools to actually practice such rights are quickly becoming

accessible and affordable to all single, average individuals

Digital communication and data management must be open, to remove any

artificial barrier


Problem: something is wrong in the world

First step: start a Facebook Group

Second and Final step: feel good NOW, on your chair

Slacktivism: “feel-good online activism that has

zero political or social impact”http://neteffect.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/05/19/the_brave_new_world_of_slacktivism

Slacktivism is the new apathy

Image source:http://www.flickr.com/photos/69805768@N00/3292899689/

Does this mean that social networks, instant messaging and so on are intrinsically and

always evil?

No, they are so powerful that it would be a real shame to use them only to play


Duties of Quality Educators

"perhaps the greatest service that virtual reality can give to today’s culture

is the recovery of reality" Fr J. Fox, SDB

make clear that there is no such thing as some mythical

cyberspace, separate from reality

but that, instead, the one real world we've always lived in is being

deeply transformed by digital technologies

What we do in “cyberspace”, we're doing in the real world

We must not escape in “cyberspace”, but use it to make the world a

better place, because the first can give us more control on the second


Duties of Quality Education (2)

Teach and practices simplicity: “everything should be as simple as

possible, but not simpler” (A. Einstein)

Examples:

BridgeIT, Tanzania: after proper training,teachers

download video content through cellular phones

and view it on a TV with their students

http://mobileactive.org/bridgeit-mobiles-classroom,

www.iyfnet.org/document.cfm/751

Wannigame: mobile phone application to supervise the learning of numbers by

children between the age of 3 to 5.


Only distribute content in Open File Formats!!

The great majority of end users of Open Educational material will use OpenOffice, which cannot guarantee correct formatting of proprietary Microsoft formats

Duties of Quality Educators (3)

Example: shifting table in Architectural planning module from OLE library


“sending proprietary attachments with email is as socially unacceptable as smoking in a closed room full of people” (real email signature of a Hong Kong University professor)

Duties of Quality Educators (4)

The OpenDocument Format (ODF) is the only viable alternative to the .doc, .ppt and ..xls files which are the main, if not only, real reason of the Microsoft monopoly on the desktop

Distribution of content in ODF format is (besides being often necessary, see previous slide) an excellent strategy to educate all students to the benefits of open digital technologies

To know more: www.opendocumentfellowship.com


All the data we need to live decently are, or will soon be, in digital format:

therefore, closed/secrets data formats are never, ever acceptable. This is not

negotiable

Quality Basic Education should include the awareness that, since digtalness has

entered every corner and level of our life, the rights that already existed now

also have a digital form

We must never ignore software or escape in cyberspace, but use them to

improve the real space we keep living in.

Conclusions


Suggested reading:

Talks and seminars at http://mfioretti.com

(which also contain all the sources not quoted here)

“Open Government”, O'Reilly, Jan. 2010,http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596804367/

Articles at http://stop.zona-m.net

Contact info: [email protected]

Questions?

References & contact info