Over two hundred people turned up for the Peace and Creativity Salon at the United Nations University on Friday, 26 September. We set up a screen and video projector in the UNU courtyard, and Global Lives built their installation at the front of the campus (photo credit - Jason Hall).

The event began at 5pm with the first public screening of the Wisdom Years, a new documentary from the UNU and the World Health Organization. The documentary looks at ageing in Japan.

This was followed by the world premiere of the new documentary from Director Tim Wise, entitled Soldier of Peace. We had a video conference link up with Tim and he explained that his intention when making the filmq was to “put peace back on the agenda in the 21st Century.”

We then went into salon mode with plenty of time for people to interact over food and drink. At this point in the evening, we held a screening in the UNU Media Studioof the award winnng documentary from the UNU entitled Voices of the Chichinuatzin. We rounded the evening off with a dance performance from PeaceBoat.

The event was organized by the UNU, in collaboration with Temple University, Global Lives, and many more.

The Wisdom Years documentary was screened at Silver College in Kobe on 8 and 9 September 2008 and colleagues from the WHO Centre for Health Development were on hand to answer questions.

Silver College appears in the Wisdom Years documentary as an example of how communities can provide educational facilities for retirees. The screenings were well recevied by the college students and over one hundred attended.

Also this week, we completed the English and Japanese versions of the website that suppoorts the documentaries. We call it an e-case study (similar to Saving the Ayuquila River).

Take a look and let us know what you think.

The Media Studio team is just back from Sapporo where we joined people from over 60 countries in the iSummit’08. The yearly event is organized by iCommons, an organization at the forefront of an international movement that seeks to develop a united global commons by collaborating in open education, access to knowledge, free software, open access publishing and free culture communities around the world.

The event was extremely inspiring for us. For a long time UNU Media Studio has been committed to the ideals of collaborative production and open sharing of content over the Internet. The iSummit’08 gave us the opportunity to get in touch with talented people from all over the world who share these ideals and who are finding creative ways to implement them in practical terms in a wide range of disciplines such as video production, education, publishing, business, law, photography, government, and fashion amongst others. [ read more ]

Today, the UNU Media Studio participated in an online seminar with the Pan-Pacific Distance Learning Association. We were talking about Open Content, Open Software and Open Learning. The presenters were Paul McKimmy from the University of Hawaii, Scott Belford from the Hawaii Open Source Education Foundation and myself from the UNU.

We used Elluminate to connect everybody and as a presented it was a really interesting experience. I am pretty comfortable now making presentations over video conferencing. However, with Elluminate you really need to multi-task since there is are plenty of options for audience interaction.

They can raise their hands for questions, give you a smiley face or thumbs down, or you can poll their opinions. It is all pretty seamless, but takes some getting used to.

We were looking to have excellent moderators from the UH College of Education - Peter Leong and Adam Tanners - who basically kept an eye on things. Thanks so much fro this valuable experience!

Universities in the Asia Pacific region need to embrace something equivalent to the European Bologna Process, according to UNU Rector Konrad Osterwalder. Speaking at the Asia Pacific Initiative 2008 Partnership Workshop on 13-14 March 2008, Rector Osterwalder argued that higher education in the region needs to undergo strategic reforms designed to make it more compatible, comparable, and competitive.

Rector Osterwalder was addressing an audience of forty academics drawn from universities in Japan, the United States, Thailand, Fiji, Samoa, Indonesia and India that make up the Asia Pacific Initiative.

The Bologna Process began with a declaration signed by European ministers of education in June 1999 and seeks to create a European Higher Education Area in 2010.

Remarking on the difficulties encountered when organizing joint courses across Asia Pacific in terms of differing academic calendars and credit systems, the UNU Rector stated that a grand vision is needed for higher education in the region in order to facilitate even more extensive collaboration and academic exchange.

When I first read Brian Lamb’s post on easy and inexpensive course hosting, I missed the link he made to a presentation by Jim Groom and D’Arcy Norman at the Open Education 2007 Conference.

But I just followed the link and I am impressed by the way they went about presenting the idea of building your own courses in Wordpress (and hosting them at Wordpress.com). They don’t just talk about it, they do it and share the experience, including the limitations with anyone who is interested.

They give five reasons for using Wordpress.com to build open content. It is free, has a large community of users, it is easy to use, has lots of services and its portable (if you out grow it, you can take your stuff with you). If you want to extend it, add to the code, you can set up Wordpress on your own server.

That is what we do at the UNU Media Studio. We also benefit from accessing the large number of plug-ins available. We build on these plug-ins and share back with the community.

They are right - developing and sharing open content should not be rocket science - anyone should be able to do it.

Last year, with support from the Joint Activity Fund, three UN University research institutes and the Media Studio worked together to develop the UN University Opencourseware portal, officially launched today, 4 February 2008. The aim of this pilot project was to publish at least ten courses as required in order to remain a member of the Global Opencourseware Consortium.
This initial collaboration brought together specialists from Macau (UNU-IIST), Canada (UNU-INWEH), the Netherlands (UNU-MERIT) and Japan (UNU-MEDIA), to publish courses on e-Governance, Innovation, Economic Development and Environmental Conservation (mangroves and watersheds).
As the platform, we selected eduCommons developed by the Centre of Open and Sustainable Learning at the Utah State University, because it is both free and open source (well, semi open source to be more precise). We managed to customize eduCommons so that it would have the same look and feel as the main UNU website.
We hope that our current suite of opencourseware will prove useful to students and educators all over the world. In the future, we plan to expand the portal with the inclusion of courses from the remaining UNU institutes and programmes.

A new group of researchers has just come together at UNU-MERIT in Maastricht under the leadership of Rishab Ghosh. The Collaborative Creativity Group looks at the socio-economics of collaboration across all domains - Free / Libre or Open Source Software (FLOSS), opencourseware, Web 2.0, wikipedia….the list goes on.
This young and dynamic team undertakes research on mechanisms for innovation, on ways of paying for public knowledge, on how policy-makers can support creativity, and on how firms and others can collaborate to promote economic growth and welfare.
They have some really exciting projects including the first ever Wikipedia user survey, in cooperation with the Wikimedia Foundation.
The UNU Media Studio has been fortunate to work with this new group on the UNU Opencourseware portal and we look forward to doing more together in the future.

Yet again, we are indebted to Stephen Downes for this posting. I don’t know how he does it, but he is a constant source of really useful information.
It appears that there is an interesting tool to support groups of people who want to create videos online together. Kaltura (beta) provides a group online editor that is easy to use.
Using this tool, it is envisaged that musicians, film-makers, students, activities, NGOs, and just about everybody else can work together to create and share their video content.
Kaltura is partnering with the Wikimedia Foundation and is creating quite buzz via Wikieducator. This is a very positive development and one we, here at the UNU Media Studio in Tokyo, will follow with great interest. Take a look at the development wiki to see the results.

David Harper from the University of Leicester dropped me a line this week. He is an aquatic ecologist who works with film-makers and local communities to produce documentaries on biodiversity conservation.
One film-maker that David works closely with is Richard Brock, who launched the Brock Initiative which seeks to use “archive of footage, and to ask others to do the same, to create new programs, not made for a general TV audience, but made for those who are really connected to the situation in hand.”
Together they produced a documentary about Lake Naivasha in Kenya, entitled “A Lake on the Edge.” It is accessible via Youtube and can be viewed below.
They have an exciting new project funded by the UK Darwin Initiative, to make films with local communities about Biodiversity Conservation in Kenya and Tanzania and a smaller project developing biodiversity conservation education material for Indonesia which will produce 3 films. The film-making in both is being done people who have studied with Richard.
It is time that we start looking for ways to connect up and further expand these kinds of initiatives. Now if you have the time, please watch the documentary.