🇸🇽 Going back to (Filipino) school. This week I did an introduction to open models for IT students (and staff) at the College of Arts and Sciences in Inabanga, Bohol.

My intervention took place as part of the Bridging Youth Through Technology Empowerment (BYTE) Training Program initiated recently by the CVISNet foundation that aims to bring some fundamental concepts of digital technologies: https://www.projectbyte.org/

A sharing of knowledge over 2 days with 2h30 of truly formal education:

- 1h of theory during the first day where I try to bring an overview of these different openness movements, explaining that these sharing and collaboration practices around digital resources are emerging and growing in importance in a variety of fields. As they are IT students and the BYTE program trains them with Linux, I went through the history of open source software with this philosophical conflict between copyright and copyleft, key moments like Richard Stallman's launch of the free software movement leading to the Cathedral and the Bazaar and emergence of "open source" terminology, introducing them briefly the controversial @osi and their "Open Source Definition". To let them understand that the software running the majority of computers in the world was initially an IT student project! (cf https://open-models.org/content/history.html)

- Followed the next day by a workshop of 1h30 to start an open software library around the @OpenAlex API. A moment to let them experiment the setting of open software production around a shared repository for the class while using an open science tool to explore these ways to access research. A way to truly live this complementarity between open models. (Workshop guidelines: https://open-models.org/workshops/openalex-library.html)

As foundational but underexplained topics of digital technologies, we open discussion around how we could introduce more knowledge related to open models within curriculums, whether it's the BYTE curriculum or the ones of the school.

Part of the challenge is about training pedagogical teams to let them truly understand these dynamics to enable them to slowly integrate and adapt these concepts more autonomously into their educational work. Will probably go back to this Bohol island to try to empower them while continuing to build this knowledge on open models and digital commons to be able to rely on it! (https://open-models.org)

Trying currently to connect with universities and schools in the Philippines.

In tech, there is this common idea of trying to build the next Google. I invited them instead to dream bigger and try to build the next Wikipedia, the next Linux or the next OpenAlex!

#openmodels #openeducation #openscience #opensource #opensoftware #digitalcommons #philippines