There is something about our flag that makes my heart pound. Especially when we sing our national anthem, as I place my hand on my chest, a surge of love for country and the Filipino keeps giving me goosebumps. A few times, tears in my eyes or tightness in my throat.

Each time I see our nation’s banner mightily fly, my hope is renewed.

Whenever I hear children sing Lupang Hinirang, the hope swells.

Unfurled and free, proud and true

Soars high the white, red and blue

Like your three stars and a sun

Your children will stand as one.

Mabuhay Pilipino!
Mabuhay Pilipinas!

While blogging my be one of the more popular routes for communication and self-expression it can also be a good tool for elearning. Sir Martin has used it extensively, and so has Ms. Lacs. I’m sure that there are more teachers out there that I have not come across (and I would appreciate it if you make them known to me. Or you make yourself known, ok?).   It is my opinion that anybody who wants to use technology for education should start and keep a blog.

Most bloggers would generally be victims of spammers in all forms, shapes and sizes.  A form of spam blogs, scraping content from different sources, have targeted a lot of local bloggers like Yuga, as you can probably see at the end of his posts. Though I am nowhere near Abe’s league, I have had some brushes or two siphoners which fizzled out after a while. (I don’t know if I’ll be mad or thrilled, swinging from “Why don’t you write your own stuff!” to “Is my content not good enough for you?”). RSS Aggregators have made it very easy to do just that. While some copycats have actually copy-pasted manually, RSS has made it possible to automatically suck off content.

Though we may fume at the temerity of this practice and blame the creators of the aggregators, a new positive application for this technology has been gaining praise and approval: using WordPress as eLearning platform using RSS aggregators/scrapers (like wp-o-matic the (”spamblogging” plug-in) to collect a series of posts/courses. Here is a try by David Wiley which looks very promising - and anyone who would want to learn about new media (Blog and Soul Movement, this is a great resource to use for schools! Or anybody for that matter).  A technologically-similar undertaking by Stephen Downes can be found here.

The eLearning community, especially the open education and resources (OER) advocates are quite excited about this resurgence. Though many admit that it has surfaced before, it is now that is gaining steam and ready for a comeback.

Translation for the Philippines: Imagine the top 10 teachers of of the same subject using the same curriculum. They put their course content (text, images, video, etc) in their blogs under a CC license. A new teacher can re-use, remix content from them and greatly improve the quality of his course. Imagine that being done to all subjects. On all levels.

Then, use WordPress Multi-User… What do you have?

A free online school!

If you can get all these content, courseware, applications and systems inside a USB drive and have a UMPC like OLPC or the Asus EEE and tweak it so it could run by itself, you’ll have a school in your computer!

Scale this globally and we would have revolutionized education as we know it.
There is no probably little or no problem for GoogleReader to be a school with this scheme. I’d like to see them put a big effort to make this one work without making money out of it (read ads or fees). Just because it’s a good thing to do.

Would Microsoft, Yahoo and the others be left behind? Just ditto re: bold line for Google.

To teachers and anybody who has good content to share: PLEASE PUT YOUR CONTENT ONLINE AND SHARE (use the CC license models)!

To the techies: Can you help make the steps of putting this up, maintaining and monitoring easier, faster and more efficient? Maybe a desktop and online application that is widgetizeable, customizable and open source? I’m sure you can make it as easily as I think it.

Would this solve (at least partially) a great engineering challenge of the 21st century.

Electrification. Electronics, computers and the internet. Radio, TV and highways.

These are just some of the greatest engineering achievements of the 20th century.  This site lists down the top 20.
Now living in the 21st century, we probably take these for granted. I combed through each one and initially concluded that there were only two items I have not encountered or used personally. I was wrong since number 20 is extensively used in medicine, specially with cancer treatment. That leaves only number 12, but that is something that I hope Sir Richard Branson and his baby or kin would give me the opportunity to experience.

The current time also leaves us with a lot of obstacles, identified here.

With input from people around the world — much of it on this website – an international group of leading technological thinkers were asked to identify the Grand Challenges for Engineering in the 21st Century.

They came up with these:

Make solar energy economical
Provide energy from fusion
Develop carbon sequestration methods
Manage the nitrogen cycle
Provide access to clean water
Restore and improve urban infrastructure
Advance health informatics
Engineer better medicines
Reverse-engineer the brain
Prevent nuclear terror
Secure cyberspace
Enhance virtual reality
Advance personalized learning
Engineer the tools of scientific discovery

If the world can overcome all of these challenges, a new era will dawn upon us. I can’t even begin to imagine how things would be much better.
Already, thinkers, inventors, researchers, engineers and scientists are working on these.

Every person on earth stand to benefit from solving these riddles.

There is also a poll on the site that ranked “Making solar energy economical” as the most “popular/important” challenge. I agree. But there is another challenge that is close to my heart which is Advanced Personal Learning. I think this is key to solving poverty, wars and disease. If this is solved, I think the rest would just follow.

Which challenge, when solved, would create the greatest impact on our world?

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Though this website is not the crowd-drawer I’ve envisioned it to be, there are two post that have been getting non-blogger’s attention.

The first one is a review of Og Mandino’s The Greatest Miracle in the World. Originally posted in August 2005, it still draws some searches and comments. You know these are not your regular commenters which probably gives you an idea what led them to the post in the first place.

The second one is about Distance Education and eLearning from UP’s perspective, which is actually not mine buy I got permission to re-post it.

A common thread that I see is about schooling. The Greatest Miracle in the World is probably part of the reading requirement in some schools - a book report - judging from the requests for a summary. The queries about distance education were mostly about information, thus I just point them to UPOU.org

Though it is quite a jump, I’d like to conclude think that we still have a culture and predisposition to learning. We might be at that point where we are truly aware of the power of the internet for education.

Who knows, maybe we will play a major part in the next education revolution.