Symposium "Expanded Education"

http://www.educacionexpandida.org | http://www.zemos98.org

The 11th ZEMOS98 International Festival (22th - 28th March | Seville,
Spain) focuses on the search for new forms of education that respond to
the social and communicational processes arising from the Internet.

New digital culture is characterised by networked organisation,
collective work, convergence culture, copyleft, etc. The fact that most
of these processes haven’t been incorporated into conventional
educational systems means that new forms of education aren’t taking
place only - or even mainly - within formal schooling, and they are not
being led by educational institutions. There are now countless artistic,
scientific, communicational and educational projects of a cultural,
social, digital and audiovisual nature, and these make up the
cutting-edge of 21st century education - an expanded form of education
that goes beyond the narrow, traditional institutional, thematic and
methodological boundaries.

Media literacy merges with science and creativity to generate a third
networked culture which places special value on design thinking,
laboratories as working spaces, the idea of process rather than
instrument, the blurring of boundaries between professional and amateur
(the concept of pro-am), innovation as a driving force for knowledge and
the commons as a research tool.

Education can happen everytime, everywhere. Inside and outside the walls
of the academic institution. The context of the digital economy
represents a new opportunity to recover the idea of reciprocity in the
distribution of forms of knowledge.

The inspiration and the touchstones behind this symposium include Paulo
Freire’s pedagogy of the question, Ferrer i Guardia’s rationalist
schools, the evocative images of Zero for Conduct, political
anarcho-syndicalism and anarchist education practices (from Kropotkin to
Chomsky), video as a tool for social change, community media, free
radio, telestreets and the theatre of the oppressed.

The symposium is structured in three main parts: lectures, project
presentations and workshops.

1. The lectures will be presented by Jesús Martín Barbero, Brian Lamb
and Ronaldo Lemos. They are - from different perspectives - actively
involved in developing new educational models for networked, digital
culture based on a critical and proactive attitude to traditional
educational systems and paradigms. Martín Barbero will present
“Educational City: from a society with educational system to a knowledge
and learning society”; Brian Lamb will talk about “The urgency of open
education: cheap thrills, radical reuse, and feed-frenzied learning”;
and, finally, Ronaldo Lemos on “The Future Challenges of Education:
Communities, Free Culture and Intellectual Property”.

2. The workshops will allow participants to implement many of the ideas
behind the symposium, and allow an opportunity for “learning by doing”
in a broader context than that usually offered by academia. If the
lectures think in global, the workshops are working on local. The Bank
of Common Knowledge is “a pilot experience dedicated to the research of
social mechanisms for the collective production of contents, mutual
education, and citizen participation”. Platoniq - responsible for this
project - will work in a different context they are used to: the
“Polígono Sur” in Sevilla, the cheapest site in Europe, very close (a
bit more than 1 km.) to the most expensive site in Sevilla (”La
Buhaira”). Is it possible to get this neighbourhood self-esteem back
reconsidering the value of common knowledge further than inside the
school?. A group of theachers from IES Antonio Domínguez Ortiz,
platoniq.net, ZEMOS98 and different associations from the Polígono Sur
have been working on this idea for 3 months, and will work intensively
from 16th to 20th, March. They will present the experience on Wednesday,
25th March in the 11th edition of ZEMOS98 International Festival.

In the Andalusian International University, the workshop “Introduction
to the theatre of the oppressed” by Julian Boal will put into practise
the idea of theatre “as means of knowledge and transformation of the
interior reality in the social and relational field”. The Expanded
Factory and Approximation to the creative process will complete the
programme of workshops in this symposium.

3. The call for projects invited everybody actively working in education
to present and discuss their experiences. The Festival has received more
than 50 projects from all over the world and the list of selected
presentations is available here. All of them are projects working on
research process, experimentation, reflection and development of new
educational models and learning environments.

* more information in PDF: http://tr.im/prog11
* english blog: http://unescochair.blogs.uoc.edu/