Next Wednesday, December 19th, Mariló Fernández (La
Fundició
) and Eric García and Montse Vallbona from the Asociación EspaiDer3* (youth association formed by some of the students who participated in projecte3*) will be at MediaLab-Prado (Madrid) explaining our experience in using the wiki site http://projecte3.pbwiki.com during the development of projecte3* and, by extension, as work tools in educational processes or collaborative knowledge construction (as we might prefer to call them).
Their intervention will be part of a conference entitled WikiST. Citizen production of eStandards and organized by the Fundación para el Conocimiento madri+d, a mashup of universities, public institutions and companies dedicated to research and the promotion of research and development in Madrid… phew! The presentation text of the conference does not refer to this at all, although it explains very clearly what the debate is about, here I copy it for you:
Our culture depends more and more on the production of standards (what does it mean to eat well?, what is the acceptable level of exposure to electromagnetic fields? or who is disabled?). New technologies, including wikis, allow citizens to intervene in the production of knowledge that until now has been reserved for experts. wikiST is presented as a workshop to discuss the circumstances and implications of the emergence of these new cognitive and normative scenarios.
And more specifically we will participate in the session entitled Enrolling citizens, students, neighbors… (what an… ugly word, that of “enrolling”) in which we want to reflect on the transformations that could derive from the use of wikis in traditional institutions such as the administration, the university, neighborhood associations or the school. And that’s where our contribution comes in handy. projecte3* was essentially conceived as a project to transform certain school routines that, generally assumed to be ‘neutral’, nevertheless imply very specific power relations. The funny thing is that, although the wiki opened a (social) space in which it was easier for the different agents of the project to communicate and contribute knowledge in a fairly de-hierarchical and self-organized way, to point out just a couple of the powers of this tool, it was absolutely impossible to expand the limits of the institution to transfer that experience to the physical space (the meat space, to use the dysphemism coined by some recalcitrant internet users). In addition to all this, we will soon publish a post with the grandiose title of All the truth about projecte3*.
Returning to the conference, it is coordinated by Adolfo Estalella, doctoral researcher at the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3) of the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) (he has two blogs: this one and this one) and will feature the presence of numerous web 2.0 experts/geeks such as Juan Freire, Enric Sanabre, Tíscar Lara (blog and twitter), María Luz Congosto or Julen Iturbe to name a few off the cuff. Among the presentations, the one by platoniq stands out because it is a project in which the “web 2.0” has a concrete application (the same can be said of projecte3*, so let’s see how our contribution works in this context). You can consult the complete program in the wiki of the conference, where it is worth taking a look at the links of the different speakers and the section of previous debate to the conference (significantly not very lively… for now).