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The day after Pablo Flores gave his presentation at the Ars Electronica Symposium about cloud technologies and education we were able to sit down with him for a few minutes to find out more about his projects and his current year-long sabbatical in which he will be visiting OLPC projects around the world and creating a multimedia website which compares his observations from one to one computing programs in different countries. You can find out more about the Blogging Since Infancy project and explore the blogs of participating teachers and students.

Voces Bolivianas

Elia Varela Serra and Eduardo Ávila speaking at the Digital Citizen Indaba

Eduardo Ávila, executive director of Voces Bolivianas, was invited to share his experiences at this year's Highway Africa conference in South Africa, the largest conference for journalists from across the African continent. Speaking with Elia Varela Serra from Maneno.org, Ávila presented Voces Bolivianas as a case study of how citizen media projects can welcome under-represented languages to online conversation by adapting open source tools and collaborating with volunteer translation networks. A re-cap of the session on the Digital Citizen Indaba blog:

Just as in most African countries Internet access in Bolivia is still concentrated in major urban centres, where people have Internet at home or at work. “This not only leaves out the rural resident and lower social economic sectors but also indigenous groups and women”, says Eduardo Avila, Executive Director of Bolivian Voices. But in addition, Eduardo argues that there has been an online resurgence of indigenous languages in Bolivia.

Ávila also participated in the roundtable discussion “Are people ready to have their own means od disseminating information within their communities?”

Abidjan Blog Camps

Nadine Tchaptchet-Kouamouo from Abidjan Blog Camps, a collective of bloggers from Ivory Coast who are holding regular workshops and events to bring new bloggers into their midst, was also at this year's Highway Africa conference where she was awarded the “Best Woman ICT Reporter” prize. Looking back on her time in Johannesburg (where she stayed longer than she had expected), Nadine writes:

I do not regret having tried the “way of life” of this great country of South Africa, whose level of development can be frustrating for us, but can also inspire us in our own development. Starting with representatives at the community level (women, children, youth, etc …) it is necessary for us to see farther, think bigger, and envision the best …

Blogging Since Infancy, Uruguay

Pablo Flores from Plan Ceibal, Uruguay's One Laptop Per Chile project, and Blogging Since Infancy presented at this year's Ars Electronica Symposium on Cloud Intelligence. Pablo asked the audience to consider how those who have the most to gain can benefit from the information amassing online. The value of intelligence, after all, is in solving problems facing society. Flores points to housing, nutrition, and education as three major social issues which can be improved with more access to better information. In order to bring intelligence and information from the cloud to everyday citizens in Uruguay, for example, they need a network of connectivity and devices.

Flores points to a class which set up a blog to interact with fellow students across the border in Brazil. Of course such pen pal projects have existed for decades, but the blogs allow the students to interact in real time and incorporate other tools to learn Portuguese and Spanish. His presentation concludes by emphasizing the importance of avoiding black boxes - technological gadgets which function properly, but don't allow us to understand how they function. Plan Ceibal values open source technologies as a way of promoting curiosity so that students are encouraged to look “inside” the programs and adapt them to their cultural needs.

Ethan Zuckerman live-blogged Pablo's presentation. Pablo's conference statement was published in the Ars Electronica 2009 Catalog.

HiperBarrio

HiperBarrio was represented at Ars Electronica by Álvaro Ramirez, Gabriel Jaime Vanegas, and Diego Gomez. Álvaro's presentation introduced the history and evolution of HiperBarrio and how the group of young bloggers and citizen journalists in San Javier La Loma have managed to maintain a sense of community while still introducing new members to remain open and inclusive. He stressed that HiperBarrio re-thinks the roles of libraries as more than just places to consume culture produced at the institutional level; but rather that they should serve as collective laboratories to produce and publish culture from the grassroots. HiperBarrio served as a model for Chile's national library network as it re-thought the role of its libraries for the digital era, and was also presented in the application by Fundación Empresas Públicas de Medellín which eventually led to a $1 million grant from the Gates Foundation. (Ramirez points out that none of the $1 million is currently budgeted for HiperBarrio or similar grassroots new media training programs.)

Álvaro referenced the story of Suso as an example of how citizen journalism is forming a process by which the young people discover more information about their own community and become invested in its future. He also pointed out media production is providing an appealing alternative to gangs and drugs for the community's young people. An article in Colombia's El Tiempo newspaper adds:

The project was presented to the public at Ars Electronica with a video which highlights the important role HiperBarrio plays to help young people find alternatives to crime, violence and drugs in a region that has been marked by the drug trafficking, guerrillas and paramilitaries.

“When people have no access to media, and are given the opportunity to tell their stories and show who there are, then they take that opportunity,” Ramirez said to the public.

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Pablo Flores from Plan Ceibal, Uruguay's One Laptop Per Chile project, and Blogging Since Infancy presented at this year's Ars Electronica Symposium on Cloud Intelligence.

Pablo asked the audience to consider how those who have the most to gain can benefit from the information amassing online. The value of intelligence, after all, is in solving problems facing society. Flores points to housing, nutrition, and education as three major social issues which can be improved with more access to better information. In order to bring intelligence and information from the cloud to everyday citizens in Uruguay, for example, they need a network of connectivity and devices.

The Uruguayan government was the first to sign on completely to OLPC’s vision of providing a laptop to every school-aged child. The government has also worked with national telecommunications companies to provide free or discounted access to students and their parents around the country. But Flores emphasizes that technological change by itself will not automatically lead to social development.

In order to take advantage of participatory tools a culture of participation must exist. Research studies in Uruguay have found that parents who don't know how a laptop computer and internet access can benefit them are more likely to just let the machines sit unused in the corner. To help parents, teachers, and students better understand the uses and possibilities of the computers, volunteer university students from Montevideo have formed Flor De Ceibo, a club which sends teams of university students and professors out to rural schools to lead workshops with teachers, parents, and students. As part of their workshops they show how the EduBlogging platform - developed by local Uruguayan programmers - can be used to promote participatory learning both inside and outside of the classroom.

Flores points to a class which set up a blog to interact with fellow students across the border in Brazil. Of course such pen pal projects have existed for decades, but the blogs allow the students to interact in real time and incorporate other tools to learn Portuguese and Spanish. His presentation concludes by emphasizing the importance of avoiding black boxes - technological gadgets which function properly, but don't allow us to understand how they function. Plan Ceibal values open source technologies as a way of promoting curiosity so that students are encouraged to look “inside” the programs and adapt them to their cultural needs.

Ethan Zuckerman live-blogged Pablo's presentation. Pablo's conference statement was published in the Ars Electronica 2009 Catalog.

Fortunately for Uruguay's education system, a group of dedicated volunteer programmers, instructors, and technologists have formed the Ceibal Jam! movement to develop applications for XO laptops that meet the specific needs of Uruguayan primary school instructors and students. (Rezwan has written previously about the first Ceibal Jam gathering last year.) Gabriel Eirea, a professor of engineering at the University of the Republic and a coordinator of Ceibal Jam!, describes the mission of the community:

I was able to attend last week's Ceibal Jam! gathering at the University of Montevideo in which approximately 50 volunteers came together to present the applications they have been developing, to propose new applications, and to both improve and document existing applications like Ceibal-Chess, EduBlog, and PlayGo.

As Gabriel Eirea emphasizes in the above video, one of the current priorities for Ceibal Jam is to develop small applications which can be used by instructors to teach a single concept over a few days; for example, an application that helps students learn the multiplication table, or to better understand the concept of fractions. In fact, Eirea himself was involved in the development of Conozco Uruguay, a simple application to help students improve their knowledge of Uruguay's geography.

With this in mind, Ana Cichero proposed a game for the XO laptop to make learning basic mathematic principles fun and interactive. Within minutes of her proposal several participants of the session were already writing code to make the proposal a program. Other sessions throughout the day introduced the basics of the Python coding language, how to develop with high performance graphics, and a proposal to create a game that teaches human rights to children. You can learn more about Ceibal Jam, download their programs for the Sugar operating system, and stay tuned to new developments on their website.

The XO-1 laptop. OLPC is now engineering the next version.

Designing the laptop, it turned out, was probably the easiest piece of the puzzle. OLPC founder and chairman Nicholas Negroponte had originally touted the XO as the “$100 laptop”, but in order to produce the machine at such a low cost they would need to convince dozens of national governments to purchase tens of millions of laptops. Instead, the program was until very recently only able to convince the government of one single country, Uruguay, which ordered 100,000 machines back in October of 2007 at $188 per machine. Fast-forward 20 months - and 200,000 more laptops - and the Technological Laboratory of Uruguay (LATU) is just a couple month's away from delivering the very last green and white laptops into the hands of every single Uruguayan primary school student.

As I described in an earlier article, the first two years of the OLPC deployment in Uruguay “have been characterized by implementation and incubation. The laptops have been deployed to schools, manuals have been created, tech savvy volunteer groups have been formed, wireless internet connections have been established, teachers have slowly learned how to implement the laptops into their curricula and classrooms, and, as Rezwan has covered previously, a community of open source programmers has developed educational applications for the laptops.”

Last week I visited Uruguay myself to witness how teachers and students were incorporating laptops and wi-fi connections (now in over 1,000 schools) into the classroom environment. My first gray blistery morning in Montevideo I joined a van full of professors and students from the Universidad de la República who were headed to Santa Lucía, a small town in the department of Canelones just an hour's drive from the capital. After a few accidental detours and several thermoses of mate tea, we pulled up to Santa Lucía's one and only primary school. Dozens of primary school students in white frocks were sitting on steps and tree trunks with their XO laptops, pecking away as if they were in a wi-fi café in Tokyo or New York City.

Santa Lucía's “Escuela 104″ (every school in Uruguay is given a number) teaches all of the town's young students in morning and afternoon shifts. That is, half of Santa Lucía's students come early in the morning and stay until lunch, and the other half arrive in the afternoon and stay until the early evening. When Pablo Flores, a professor of engineering at the Universidad de la República and a coordinator of Flor de Ceibo, asked the school's teachers if they had any problems or complaints regarding the XO laptops, one immediately responded, “the kids hang around here all day long. We can't get them to go home. Is there anything you can do to helps us?”

Pablo later told me that such reactions are typical during his frequent visits to schools around the country. However, while I found the comment to be entertaining, Pablo smiled softly with discouragement. On the way to Santa Lucías several of the volunteer students from the Universidad de la República shared their stories of teachers who felt threatened by the presence of the laptops in their classrooms. The younger teachers, they all agreed, tended to embrace the change and try to incorporate the laptops as much as possible into the classroom environment. But some of the older teachers felt that their position of authority in the classroom was threatened by the presence of the laptops and the power they gave the young students. As many university professors have discovered in recent years, laptops and internet connections in the classroom often lead to students chatting behind the professor's back. Or, as George Landow put it in Hypertext 3.0, “Technology always empowers someone. It empowers those who possess it, those who make use of it, and those who have access to it.”

I do not want to overstate the point. After all, this particular morning we were in the school's humble computer lab surrounded by eight or so teachers who all took time out of their busy schedules to learn more about the XO laptops and how they can make better use of them in the classroom. They were eager to learn and quick to make entertaining jokes about their frustrations with the new technologies. I imagined myself as a primacy school instructor - with over 20 years of teaching experience - having to learn new teaching techniques from volunteer university students who have never experienced the enormous challenge of keeping a classroom in order.

We were in Santa Lucía to give workshops explaining how to use the EduBlog blogging platform developed by a team of Uruguayan and American programmers. The XO laptops have been great at bringing information from the wider world to Uruguayan students, thanks to projects like Wikipedia and Conozco Uruguay, both of which come pre-installed on the machines. But, as Pablo explained to the gathered teachers, the laptops also permit Uruguayans to contribute content, stories, and knowledge to the vast repository of civilization that is the internet:

Each of the teachers created her own individual blog, and they then created a group blog for the entire school titled, appropriately enough, Escuela 104 de Santa Lucía.

One teacher, who registered under the username “sancac”, wrote:

Te cuento que soy una maestra de primer año de la escuela Nº 104 “Leticia Volpe” ubicada en la ciudad de Santa Lucía ,depto Canelones .Se encuentra ubicada en las calles R. Argentina, Tajes, Brasil y Tajes.Es una escuela de doble turno con un total de 700 niños aproximadamente. Estos son mis hijos……..

Another teacher, “ladelsanta” published a post with photos of nearby landmarks:

La Escuela Nº 104 se encuentra ubicada en la ciudad de Santa Lucía, a orillas del río del mismo nombre. En sus comienzos, fue escuela sólo para varones, con el correr del tiempo eso cambió y se transformó en escuela mixta como sigue siendo actualmente. Mi madre concurrió a esta escuela, que la llamaban la “escuela grande” porque ocupaba toda la manzana (actualmente compartida con el liceo Nº2).
Se destaca en nuestra localidad el primer hotel turístico del país, el hotel Biltmore

You can use Google's machine translation to read the rest of the teachers' entries.

The morning blogging workshop was facilitated by Pablo Flores and Mariel Cisneros Lopez, both professors from the Universidad de la República. But in the afternoon session, attended by over a dozen teachers, the university students took the lead, facilitating an outstanding workshop that got the teachers enthusiastic about the possibilities of blogging in the classroom. Flor de Ceibo will continue to organize expeditions to primary schools across the country in order to show teachers and students how they can share their stories, articles, and homework assignments online by using the EduBlog platform. Later in the year, with the financial support from their Rising Voices microgrant, they will organize a competition which awards prizes to students who publish the best entries about particular topics chosen by a committee of judges.

In the second part to this post, we will examine how EduBlog was created and how the CeibalJam movement is creating a local, dedicated community of open source volunteers who program for the XO laptop.

In a 2007 academic paper reflecting on the first phase of the OLPC deployment in Uruguay, Juan Pablo Hourcade, Daiana Beitler, Fernando Cormenzana, and Pablo Flores write:

The increasing digital divide between those in developed and developing regions of the world has the potential of increasing the economic gap between these regions. The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Foundation has championed the idea of providing every child in developing regions with a laptop in order to address this problem. The idea is that by providing children with computer and information resources, they will be better prepared to compete in the global economy through computer and information literacy as well as a wider world view …

… overall, we found that in spite of several problems with connectivity, malfunctioning input devices, and software not designed taking into account young children’s abilities or the need for localization, the laptops so far had a very positive impact. Children are motivated to read and write more using the laptops, they are accessing information resources that are far beyond what was previously available to them, they are creating content for the world to see, and collaborating and learning from each other.

There are several obstacles, however, standing in the way of participatory, networked education. First, it is an election year in Uruguay and, as Yama Ploskonka points out, President Vásquez is eager to paint Project Ceibal in favorable light as he heads out of office, while opposition candidates are quick to criticize the program as having a large budget and small impact. But it is the national telco monopoly ANTEL who has the most to lose if internet access is given freely to schools and students, as was originally proposed.

Countering Ploskonko's criticisms, however, Miguel Brechner of Project Ceibal says the government has reached an agreement with ANTEL for a special rate of $8 a month for families with students. By the end of the year he claims that 380,000 laptops will have been deployed in 2,000 schools, and that Montevideo will have 350 wi-fi hotspots where students can connect to the net.

The first two years of Project Ceibal have been characterized by implementation and incubation. The laptops have been deployed to schools, manuals have been created, tech savvy volunteer groups have been formed, wireless internet connections have been established, teachers have slowly learned how to implement the laptops into their curricula and classrooms, and, as Rezwan has covered previously, a community of open source programmers have developed educational applications for the laptops.

One of those applications is Edublog, a customized blogging tool for the XO laptops. Already a number of teachers with laptops in their classrooms are using blogs to publish information about their classes. However, publishing to a Blogspot- or WordPress-based blog from an XO laptop has proven to be difficult. A wiki page describing the architecture of the system explains:

Blogs are an excellent educational tool as demonstrated by the use of Google Blogger in Villa Cardal, Uruguay. The kids had some issues and requested changes to make the system easier to use. Setting up the system on the XO was difficult due to Blogger's many features and bandwidth intensive resources. Technicians needed to assist in actually posting the blog entries to the internet. Very few (if any) current blogging systems are easy enough for use by young children in the low bandwidth environment they have in third world countries. The Educational Blogger Project will address these problems. Essentially, it stores posts locally using Moodle (or similar service) and allows for kids to collaborate, gives teachers the control they need and optimizes the process for the XO environment. It also allows teachers to release posts to Google Blogger, WordPress or other blogging systems. The Educational Blogger Project significantly facilitates the use of blogs on the XO environment and makes it available for more widespread use. The ultimate goal is to create an system that can be set up easily on any XO and used by kids around the world.

You can see one such sample blog by Nati from Peñarol.

Beginning in June, Flores, along with a number of students from the University of Uruguay will organize a series of workshops in Montevideo and around the country to teach young students with XO laptops how to set up their own digital space on Edublogs where they can post stories, opinions, photos, and video.

I am sure that everyone who has worked on the One Laptop Per Child deployment in Uruguay will readily admit that it hasn't been an easy road, but the necessary infrastructure and community now exist for Uruguayan youth to take hold of their own educational and media futures.

Today's post is dedicated to the Blog Action Day 2008. This year's theme of the day is poverty.

Poverty is deprivation of common necessities that determine the quality of life, including food, clothing, shelter and safe drinking water, and may also include the deprivation of opportunities to learn, to obtain better employment to escape poverty, and/or to enjoy the respect of fellow citizens (Source)

Latest World Bank figures estimate that one billion people across the world do not get the minimum nutritional level needed to sustain themselves. To do something about it we need to engage all our resources and use whatever means we can employ to make a change.

Why are we talking about citizen media when people do not have security of food and how does citizen media sneak in to address poverty?

While the news of poverty is missing from the agenda of the mainstream media the citizen media initiatives like blogs take the lead. The Blog Action Day message is:

Today thousands of bloggers will unite to discuss a single issue - poverty. We aim to raise awareness, initiate action and to shake the web!

Citizen media requires some basic technological infrastructure like PCs, internet, electricity etc. Technology is not all about expensive gadgets and showing off but breaking through many barriers like digital divide. When in 1997 Grameen Bank started giving loan to poor women in the remote Bangladeshi villages to start commercial mobile services, people laughed. Cell phones were expensive then but their competitive advantage was the absence of land lines and many women got out of poverty. Today people can access to internet via mobile phones in the rural areas where even there is no electricity.

Image: Vilage Telephone Lady, by Jeevs Sinclair. Used under a CC license

If we look at the various Rising Voices Grantees (most of them represent marginal communities) we will see that they are using different citizen media tools such as blogs, videos, images, podcasts etc. to tell about themselves and raise awareness about poverty. They are blogging for different social causes in their communities which are normally ignored.

People may raise their eyebrows hearing to the Uruguayan government's commitment to hand over Hundred Dollar laptops (OLPCs) to every child in that country. But when the Rising Voices grantee “Blogging since infancy” will train these kids to use citizen media tools like blogging and they will share their everyday lives, we may even see something out of the ordinary. That is how technology and commitments can make a difference.

One of the aims of Rising Voices is to promote voices from underrepresented and neglected communities to the global conversation. Those people who are struggling to secure their basic needs and safety need citizen media to voice their plights, concerns. The traditional society do not give them much space. One of the challenges faced by the young citizen journalists from the Neighborhood Diaries project in Kolkata, India is that they felt very shy to enter in a cyber cafe in their community. Because they come from a red light area slum, some people think that they are untouchables. But they vowed to challenge the digital divide to let their story be heard by the world.

Image by bengal*foam : Used under a creative commons license

Global Voices co-founder Ethan Zuckerman told in an interview with Africa News:

“I think citizen media will be critical in helping non-Africans connect more closely to African stories. I think that bloggers and other citizen authors offer readers the opinion to connect with an author as well as with a story, and that this may build human connections to stories that otherwise might be ignored or missed.”

So why should you care about poverty or help the people who are fighting poverty? Shawn at Uncultured.com says:

Because our long term well being - not our well-being for the next semester or the next financial quarter - depends on how we care for the least off among us. Now, more than ever, we need to realize, understand, and embrace the notion that making the world a better place for others makes it a better place for us all.

How can you help to eradicate poverty or make a change? You can play a role in the citizen media outreach by helping the people who are doing this important task. David Sasaki informs of some examples:

Nari Jibon center in Dhaka, which incorporates citizen media into existing English, computer, and Bangla classes for young Bangladeshi women. Much of the amazing content produced by Nari Jibon bloggers is thanks to the training they have received at workshops put on by an unlikely yet highly proficient group of veteran bloggers from Venezuela, Canada, and the United States.

Here are more innovative ways to help the Rising Voices grantees:

• Buy latop sleeves and contribute to Voces Bolivianas Project.
• Buy Etsy Bags and help the FOKO Bloggers in Madagascar.
• Nari Jibon provides Bangladeshi women with skills rather than money in order to provide more opportunities. As little as $17 covers an entire Microsoft Office training program including four cyber-cafe passes.
• Kalam, the organization behind the Neighbourhood Diaries project in Kolkata, India has released a PDF version of their annual Open Box of Poetry which is available for a suggested donation of US$5. All proceeds will go toward continuing Kalam’s outreach work in Kolkata.

These are only some examples. If you are interested you can learn about more of these projects.

Today is another important day. Its Global Handwashing Day and learn more about it here.

Ceibal Florida Blog reports:

“The delivery of a laptop to every child in our public schools generated profound changes. For example the sidewalk of the school ceased to be an empty space to become the ‘path of communication'. Today if we go through the various schools will see that this space is a rallying point (of XO laptop toting kids), in any time of the day.”

Here are some more great pictures of Uruguayan kids with XO laptops in poor neighborhoods.

And look what great contents these kids are developing!

The children of class four at School No. 37 “Canada” (4º Año A de la Escuela Nº 37 “Canadá) are using their XO laptops to tell the world via blog that:

“The educational value of art is unique and its realization in the school is given because the instrument is the same person, appreciating or producing artistic works that arouse their emotions, their feelings, their thoughts, allowing an exploration of themselves and the group.” (machine translation)

The children of class Six at School No. 37 “Canada” (Sextos años de la Escuela 37 “Canadá”) portrays their exhibition of work with recycled materials in their blog:

A few days ago we did an exhibition of work done with unused material, recycling. The proposal was to do a story with an imaginary character and then build the character with scrap materials.

The difference of OLPC and eToys for children are explained by Ceibal Florida Blog:

Students produce materials in the docs and share with other colleagues and download. In this way they can guide their presentations and work collaboratively. This advantage not found in ETOYS. It is also possible to embed into the blog. An example of these activities can be viewed at the following blog.

Ceibal Jam

In our previous feature we reported that the Plan Ceibal project (OLPC in Uruguay) organized a programming “jam” in order to induce local programmers to develop innovative applications of the OLPC laptops which had already reached the hundreds of thousands of Uruguayan students. Because the laptops currently miss many applications to help students learn and participate in the classroom.

On 30th of August and 6th of September, two consecutive Saturdays the 2nd Ceibal Jam was held in Uruguay Catholic University. It continued to strengthen a community of technicians and educators who want to learn more about the technologies used in the Plan Ceibal proposing new developments.

Here is a report on the Jam:

One of the things that drew the most attention is the variety of backgrounds and levels of knowledge that were accumulated in these two Saturdays: computer, teachers, researchers, architects and graphic designers amongst others, some experts in programming, others who are stirred and others simply wanted to learn.

Ceibal Plan's
Blogging since infancy project will organize two citizen media training workshops for the children in the coming months.

The project's goal is not just providing equipment and accessibility to the education centers but to ensure their use, teacher training, content development and promoting them to the community. Here are more information about this monumental effort. This has also posed a challenge to the scenario of teaching. Prof. Fernando da Rosa co-authors a report on the impact of ICT in teachers training to discuss these issues.

The children need to be taught how to harness these tools to express themselves more strongly than ever before in order to show their culture, their way of thinking and their reality. With the help of a Rising Voices Micro grant, Pablo Flores of Ceibal Plan will organize a series of workshops which will gather national and international bloggers with the young laptop-toting students to show them how to set up a blog and take advantage of other social media tools.

On June 27th Ceibal Plan launched the book “Ceibal in the society of the 21st century - References for parents and educators” (in Spanish) which was printed with the support of UNESCO. Some excerpts from its introduction which was posted in the project's English blog:

CEIBAL Plan is a great bet of Uruguay for equity, democratization of knowledge and improving education…. Children are receiving owned computers for use at school, and also in their homes, opening the possibility that its use gets shared within the family. In turn, through a huge technical effort that takes the country at the forefront in terms of connectivity, the CEIBAL Plan is carrying out internet access not only to schools but also households. This will offer to the entire community a new opportunity to learn basic computing, accessing information of interest, and engage in exchanges with other actors and agencies of society.

You can download the book online in Spanish here (pdf format) - English version is coming soon. You can access more material about the book here.

German and Micaela post their photos in the 3rd year class blog using XO

The teachers and students of the school No. 24 of Villa Cardal in Florida Department of Uruguay have done some experiments with blogging. Blog experimental de la escuela Nº24 de Villa Cardal (Experimental blog of the fourth year class of School No. 24 Villa Cardal) posts some jokes. Here is the blog of the fifth year class which shares some interesting photos and stories of the animals in the farmland. The blog of the sixth year class posts some stories and travelogues.

From the Ceibal Florida Blog:

Agustin Gallo and Cristian Fleitas are two students who attend the School No. 116 “Republic of Argentina” in Florida. They, after experimenting with all the resources provided to us by XO, felt they were “boring”. Thanks to the premium Cristian discovered the Scratch (a program for XO) and since then not abandoned it. (machine translation)

In the coming months the Ceibal Plan project is planning to organize two citizen media training workshops for the children and a final ceremony with awards. The workshops will be conducted in two regional headquarters, which initially would be Florida and Paysandu. We will be bringing to you more news of these workshops.

“When the people formerly known as the audience employ the press tools they have in their possession to inform one another, that’s citizen journalism.”

According to him ‘the people formerly known as audience‘:

“are those who were on the receiving end of a media system that ran one way, in a broadcasting pattern, with high entry fees and a few firms competing to speak very loudly while the rest of the population listened in isolation from one another— and who today are not in a situation like that at all.”

The audience has now transformed to an independent media. We have now our printing press – the blog; our own radio station, the podcasting, our own TV station, the vlog; our own gallery, the photoblogs; our own alerts, the twitter feeds and so on.

One may ask is that a problem? Who will be the audience when there too many speakers? The time has changed. We don't need to subscribe to TV guides anymore. We have on-demand and distributed contents, search engines and rss feeds to select what we need. Tom Curley, CEO of the Associated Press says:

“The users are deciding what the point of their engagement will be — what application, what device, what time, what place.”

Yes we don't quote them or us as audiences anymore but as users in this era of participatory media. Here the users also participate in debates, submit comments to the author using forms or blogs as reaction.

There is also a fine line between citizen media and citizen journalism. “Citizen journalism is a specific form of citizen media as well as user generated content” (Wikipedia) which includes a message, an information, a rhetoric, not only some personal diary entries.

Now why do we need our rhetorics to be shared with others? Do we need to preach our ideas? React to what is happening in the community or in the world? Do we need the activism? Do we need to be proactive in the expression of our opinions? Yes, if we believe in democracy and freedom of expression we need that.

The use of such rhetoric was first seen in as early as the fifth century B.C. in Athens. A democratic governance was emerging on the basis that all citizens had an equal right and duty to participate in their own government.

“To do so effectively, they needed to be able to speak in public. Decisions on public policy under the democracies were made in regularly held assemblies composed of adult male citizens; and, as in New England town meetings, anyone who wished could speak.” - On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse, Book by Aristotle, George A. Kennedy

This is probably as much true in today's world. We feel the need to share with others our successes, our plights, our threats, our challenges in the community as a member of it. Almost all of us feel a regular need to persuade someone of something, to defend our actions, and to organize our thoughts so that others will understand our point of view. We may never be engaged in a public career or may never make a speech to a large audience but with citizen media we have the freedom to express ourselves to those who want to listen.

Not only rhetoric and civic discourse are necessary for engaging in a meaningful democratic process, but these are required also to change things in our communities.

Look how the various Rising Voices projects are embracing citizen journalism and digital activism:

* The Neighborhood Diaries in Kolkata India are teaching youths from marginalized community to be citizen journalists, a status which they feel very proud of when they are on the streets interviewing someone and sharing it with the world.

* Some of the participants of Hiperbarrio project in Colombia wrote really informative articles like what Xady wrote on Colombia's medical service and we saw how the community came together to help when one of the participant wrote about Suso's plight.

* FOKO in Madagascar saw some brilliant pieces of citizen journalism and activism when Diana blogged about a project that helped cure a Kamba baby, Avylavitra wrote about the devastations of cyclone Ivan that devastated Madagascar, which was under reported in the international media.

* Cristina Quisbert, a member of Voces Bolivianas project is a perfect example of how individual citizen journalism from an ignored indigenous community can make an impact worldwide with her brilliant works.

* Women bloggers of Nari Jibon in Bangladesh uses video to show how they celebrate Bengali new year. Something an International TV channel will rarely show.

* Pablo Fores of the Ceibal Project describes how the OLPC laptops can make an impact in the most disadvantageous areas of Uruguay. A sixth grade student analyzes the performance of the OLPC laptop and shares with the world - that is the beauty of citizen journalism.

These are examples of what the Rising Voices projects are doing in the field of citizen journalism.