Chris Ward       College of the Atlantic - Fall 2006

Technologias Abiertas

Centro de Educacion para los Videojuegos y Deseno Graphicos 3D

(Open Technologies

Education Center for Video Games and 3D Graphic Design)

Background

For my Final Project Proposal, in order to set the context, I would like to start off by expressing a future interest of mine to setup a business for a very unique non governmental organization called Technologias Abiertas in the Yucatan, Mexico. It would be an Education Center that provides the resources for students to learn to use and put to practical use the commercial quality 3D graphic, animation and game design software called Blender 3D.

One of my first priorities in setting up Technologias Abiertas is to encourage the productive and fulfilling use of time and the potential resources that computers provide alongside its’ general use for entertainment value. I also hope that the users of certain computer technologies in the Yucatan will become also their creators. I hope to provide opportunities for community building through collaborative learning, effective use of space, sharing of information and ideas, and appropriate use of technology. Technologias Abiertas would be a center for digital cultural action education that the community would be able to call their own.

It is a fact that millions of youth and adults worldwide spend hundreds of hours each year playing video games on the PC or some gaming console like Nintendo or Playstation. In Mexico however, this statistic does not describe the current context of today so clearly, but it is coming to quite rapidly. Mexico is still known as a third world country economically and has only very recently dedicated itself to breaking free from this undesirable label. Life has been changing with great velocity for the citizens of Mexico in recent years, and has especially so since Vicente Fox came to office (at least in regards of use of technology). One of the major political goals in Mexico since his inauguration has been to enhance the economy and the quality of life as a whole through the increased dependence and use of modern technologies in everyday life. In the race to keep up with the quick pace of developing technologies, the state of Yucatan has become one of the forerunners in Mexico to effectively integrate themselves into the new digital world.

Having spent some significant time in the Yucatan recently with Karla Pena (www.yucatanlearning.com) and the crew of the Yucatan Spanish Immersion Program from College of the Atlantic (I attended this school program both in winter of 2004/5 and 2005/6 - more information: www.coa.edu/yucatanprog.htm), I was lucky enough to experience firsthand the growth of market demands there for computers and other modern digital technologies the same. One of the first things I noticed was that the markets in the consumer technology industries were growing exceedingly fast. The sale of electronics, like mp3 players, video players, audio equipment, and home televisions, etc. was really beginning to pick up. I noticed significant changes that had occurred even over just one and a half years. The interest in computers, software, and video gaming was no different. If anything can be told by the patterns of growth in this market in other countries like the United States, Japan, China, Germany, Holland, countries of the European Union in general, and the like, it leaves me with only one conclusion: the computer graphics and gaming fever in Mexico has only just begun.

Herein lies my inspiration for setting up a small education center for learners to develop practical skills and knowledge of an industry that is increasing in size everyday. This movement toward digital is also where I derive the direction for the development of my Senior Project. I believe that in order to foster and support the increasing thirst for knowledge Yucatecans are seeking in this digital movement, we must make available educational materials to all interested parties that are accessible to them in many forms. I am proposing to use my Senior Project therefore as an opportunity to begin a pursuit to develop a curriculum that will teach learners how to achieve their goals in a manner that celebrates ones own culture and historical backgrounds, within their own local contexts. As well I will use this opportunity to bolster the creation of a more just and livable world for all through the creative and humbled use of digital technologies, while maintaining a commitment to high quality project results.

Goals

The following are some of the major outlining goals that will guide me in my endeavor.

Design 10 introductory level lessons for the practical and functional use of the professional quality free software 3D creation suite Blender 3D (*See Appendix for more information about this software); keeping a broad focus that covers integration of functional elements from static image design, animation, and interactive media into the learning curriculum.

Have each lesson’s materials develop the learners practical and functional knowledge of the software, and the design and learning processes, their ability to design fulfilling projects for themselves in future independent studies and learning projects, and their ability to development self-satisfying results over the course of the full 10 lessons.

Make the curriculum follow a non-linear style that is project based through mini-projects that incorporate the materials covered per each lesson, and have it be hands on.

Make all lessons complete in their teaching, so that any learner is able to independently start from any lesson and understand all the steps taken in getting to the final product and completing their own final mini-project for that lesson; where each lesson however builds further on new design, development and use issues that will be used in a larger final project at the end of the course.

Incorporate the theme of designing within ones local context to try to meet local needs through projects that integrate and celebrate the learners cultural heritage, history, and self-reflection into their learning experience.

Build a model of learning and project collaboration, community involvement, and reciprocity into the educational approach that exploits the Internet as a tool for mass communication between learners; enabling learners to also become teachers and individuals to become community.

Final Product

The final product of my Senior Project can essentially be divided into three core elements.

First, a written course plan and layout, and a description and evaluation of intention for each of the 10 lessons in the course (in English).

Second, 10 complete lessons (in Spanish), recorded and distributed digitallyk, created in a video tutorial style format; all done using Free / Open formats such as Ogg Vorbis (*See Appendix), Theora (*See Appendix), and Open Document (*See Appendix), released under equally free / open licenses that preserve the freedom to share, learn from, modify and use in what ever way one decides, respective of the content being discussed (*See Appendix).

Third, an evaluation of the effectiveness of one or more courses using my own experimental techniques in both a classroom setting and virtual setting (in English, incorporating Spanish where necessary) from my own perspective, from the perspective of the classroom learners, and from the perspective of the community at large who find an interest in participating in the project as something other than learners (those from both physical and virtual space).

Criteria for Academic Evaluation

A final portfolio should be handed in that holds copies of my course curriculum, 10 complete digital video courses, course content (Blender files, rendered images, student projects, image textures, etc.), and course evaluations, allowing for a cross analysis of the results compared with my intentions and goals.

Action Plan

Firstly, it could be said that I have already begun to work on my Senior Project in many ways. I have been to the Yucatan twice now already, and in my time there I have been researching among many things, the role of technology in the Yucatan and how it is changing over time. In doing this I have been building valuable relationships with various Yucatecans there that are highly involved with the movement in Yucatan toward becoming incorporated into the digital world. I have also been developing the incredibly essential knowledge of the Spanish language in the Yucatan, which without a doubt is essential for further work and incorporation into the Yucatecan community in the future. Additionally, besides my general focus in my studies at College of the Atlantic around using modern digital technologies for social change, developing and putting into action various community development projects, cross-cultural learning, the Spanish language, and general use of digital, performance and traditional art to express oneself for the common unity of the human species and human ecological spirit, I have begun an intense independent study on the use of Blender 3D for modeling 3D objects, animation and interactive media development and how to teach it effectively to others. Finally, I have become a member of the Blender Foundation’s Education Group, and have been communicating with various students and faculty by way of e-mail and list-serves that attend various universities in the Yucatan.

Secondly then, the next steps will be officially embarking on my Senior Project. In order to understand better the context for which I will be developing this experimental 10 lesson graphics course (although the course methods and content should be flexible enough to be transferable to any number of places outside the Yucatan) I will be doing lots of ground work research in the Yucatecan during the months of January and March, 2007. I will continue there to work with various types of people to better understand the context where I am working. I will continue my learning of Blender 3D, while also of course developing my curriculum and teaching it to others in classroom settings every chance I get.

——————————————

Appendix

Blender 3D: From the Blender 3D Foundation’s website - www.blender3d.org

“Blender is the open source software for 3D modeling, animation, rendering, post-production, interactive creation and playback. Available for all major [computer] operating systems under the GNU General Public License. “

GNU General Public License is Free Software. From the Free Software Foundation’s website - www.fsf.org

“Free software is a matter of liberty not price. You should think of “free” as in “free speech”.”

“Free software is a matter of freedom: people should be free to use software in all the ways that are socially useful. Software differs from material objects–such as chairs, sandwiches, and gasoline–in that it can be copied and changed much more easily. These possibilities make software as useful as it is; we believe software users should be able to make use of them.”

“The Free Software Foundation (FSF), established in 1985, is dedicated to promoting computer users’ rights to use, study, copy, modify, and redistribute computer programs. The FSF promotes the development and use of free software, particularly the GNU operating system, used widely in its GNU/Linux variant.”

Creative Commons Open Licensing: From their Foundation website - www.creativecommons.org/

“Creative Commons licenses provide a flexible range of protections and freedoms for authors, artists, and educators. We have built upon the “all rights reserved” concept of traditional copyright to offer a voluntary “some rights reserved” approach. We’re a nonprofit organization. All of our tools are free.”

Ogg Vorbis  (OGG): From the Vorbis website - www.vorbis.com

“Ogg Vorbis is a completely open, patent-free, professional audio encoding and streaming technology with all the benefits of Open Source.”

Theora: From the official Theora  website - www.theora.org

“Theora is an open video codec being developed by the Xiph.org Foundation as part of their Ogg project (It is a project that aims to integrate On2’s VP3 video codec, Ogg Vorbis audio codec and Ogg multimedia container formats into a multimedia solution that can compete with MPEG-4 format).

Theora is derived directly from On2’s VP3 codec; currently the two are nearly identical, varying only in framing headers, but Theora will diverge and improve from the main VP3 development lineage as time progresses.”

Open Document Format (ODF): From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument

“[ODF] is an open format for saving and exchanging office documents such as memos, reports, books, spreadsheets, databases, charts, and presentations. This standard was developed by the OASIS industry consortium and based upon the XML format originally created by OpenOffice.org. ODF was approved as an OASIS standard on May 1, 2005, and was approved for release as an ISO and IEC International Standard (ISO/IEC 26300) on May 8, 2006.

The OpenDocument standard has been developed by a variety of organizations and is publicly accessible. This means it can be implemented into any system, be it open source or a closed proprietary product, without royalties. The OpenDocument format is intended to provide an open alternative to proprietary document formats so organizations and individuals can avoid being locked in to a single vendor.”

——————————————

Bibliography:

Salen, Katie, Zimmerman, Eric. “The Game Design Reader: A Rules of Play Anthology.” MIT  Press. 2005.

Roosendall, Ton, Selleri, Stefano, et al. “Blender 2.3 Guide.” Blender Foundation. 2004.

Laurent, Andrew. “Understanding Open Source and Free Software Licensing” O’Reilly Media. 2004.

Stallman, Richard, et al. “Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman.” Free Software Foundation. 2002.

Freire, Paulo. “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” Continuum. New York. 2003.

Patton, Michael. “Qualitative Research & Evaluation Methods, 3rd Ed.” Sage Publications. 2002.

Birn, Jeremy. “[Digital] Lighting & Rendering, 2nd Ed.” New Riders. 2006.

And an innumerable number of authors that have written tutorials, discussion pieces, recommendations, etc, available only online (which in my course work I will give credit too where needed).

“The impending destruction of mankind…man cannot violate or transgress the bounds of his humanism, or his human limits without tragical consequence.” Karel Čapek - Utopian R.U.R. (1920)

There is great responsibility in owning control of the developing future. Today the aging generations of men and women around the world hold a type of control over the fate of humanity that has never in history been held before. With the advanced nature of technology and science that exists today, at the turn of a switch or the push of a button, entire nations can be wiped off this earth, entire ecosystems made completely corrupt or extinct, and entire communities swallowed by darkness. In many ways they have powers equivalent to many people’s visions of gods. They are easily able to drastically change the course of the future by one simple choice, and unfortunately many times they do. Very soon however, these same men and women will die, as we all do, and in transition from life to death they will leave the greatest responsibility we have on this planet to the new generation of the world’s maturing youth, like me. We are destined to be the pioneers of science and technology of the future. We are destined to take control of those buttons and switches that in so many ways determine the progression and fate of our human race. We, the youth of today, therefore are also destined to be the ones who put responsibility and sustainability back into the system of wildly speculative and destructive technological development to replace it with one that acts with responsibility and consciousness toward the sustainability of our choices.

We must all realize how the power and influence of technology over society is growing everyday. Generally new technologies affect us first only on a local level. Quickly thereafter though it not unusual for many technologies to spread out and affect more and more people across the whole world. Digital technologies, as an example of rapidly progressing technologies that have far reaching effects, are widely known for making communication across the globe a reality in ways never before conceived possible. This is a fact that is welcomed by many the whole world over. Digital communications enhance the prospects of economic progress nearly everywhere and make public participation in the media and democratic processes more accessible to people than ever as well. They are also the catalyst for the creation of a whole slew of other technologies like high-resolution imagery, used for advanced cat-scan machines in the health fields, to high-powered telescopes and microscopes and commercial satellite technologies that enable us to keep the world in constant view. Digital technologies are also the basis for the numerous enhancements to old analogue technologies that are used in products and provide services in the transportation, energy production, and in the food and entertainment industries. In short, digital technologies help to increase the speed and efficiency at which we work and also provide more comfortable living when we do not. But this should not come as a surprise to anyone, as I am sure most all of us already understand the benefits that these advancements in science and technology provide.

However, as these examples of digital technologies show results as positive advancements, we must also recognize that parallel to this they often cause great harm outside the intended results. Disruption of communities, social isolation, smog, pollution and nuclear waste, corrupted genomes, dry wells, and melting ice-caps are only a few of the many dark clouds of consequence and repercussion that lazily weigh on our bodies and minds as a result of these advancing technologies. We have a tendency to neutralize our responsibility in the creation of the problems by reinforcing the belief that technology holds the answers to solving all the problems we face, even those created by these same technologies themselves. Disabling us to cut off the problem at its root. Additionally blinding is that we commonly claim that either today or tomorrow all problems will be solved because there are certain free market economic forces that are guiding things to eventually meet all our needs. That includes even, those implied in our need for ultimate survival. Again, leaving us humans completely free of all responsibility. I believe because of this, in order to break free from the cycle of putting responsibility on forces out of our immediate control, there needs to be a global shift in our world-view to see us as the creators of problems rather than only their solvers. I am sure too that this will only be possible by way of a fundamental restructuring of the global educational institutions, since it is here that we truly learn to think how we do in the first place.

It is my thought that if the youth of today and tomorrow are to be any different than those that currently maintain control of all the buttons and switches in the world, there must be some significant changes made in how our educational system operates at the most fundamental of levels. Through education and integration of responsibility into life itself, we must begin to empower both the growing minds of the future creators and consumers in the ways of sustainable and responsible living. If we are to avoid the pitfalls of exhaustive and destructive technological progress, I believe it is essential that responsibility and mindful sustainability is connected throughout all aspects of education, rather than being isolated into some general category such as Ethics 101. My proposition therefore is to integrate into the current education system an approach such as the one Human Ecology provides. Which, for example, provides an approach to education that implies awareness of the issues plaguing technological developmental models and the consumptive practices everywhere due to its multidisciplinary, interconnected, problem solving perspective. It is this type of awareness that I believe is essential for creating an atmosphere for change if we truly expect a better future. I will now explain more detail on how and why I think this is.

In general, it appears to me that the average educated person in this world was pushed through a westernized education system whose model brought the pupil at graduation to a point of incredibly detailed theoretical understanding in one field alone. Beyond that, the likelihood that their knowledge and understanding of other subjects is high, and so their practical use of them in day-to-day investigation almost surely falls sharply away thereafter. We are taught to mind our own business, do what we are told, and not stray very far from keeping our minds on completing the work that we have been assigned. Not that this is a bad thing in and of itself, but in general it seems to cause people to ignore alternative choices that are available to them and limits their awareness of being in a collective, interconnected world.

In my experience, knowledge building after basic education is mostly focused specifically on perspectives that detail the theoretical and practical aspects of one highly defined topic, and commonly little else follows. More often than not, ultimately we complete a narrowly focused final thesis project that in the end becomes the culminating piece of evidence that proves we have been “educated.” Rarely do people stray far from the standard perspectives defined for each of the subjects they are studying. Other than for the demands of the basic requisites then, it is very likely that each pupil is able to avoid courses that integrate questions of general epistemological importance, principles of ethics, culture, community and environmental sustainability, human studies, etc. into the equation of how we view the world and understand the problems we face in it. All of which I believe to be essential for understanding our relationship to responsibility and the rest of the world. It is also likely that even if subjects that covered these topics were chosen, the courses were not taught in a way that integrated them into the day-to-day learning so that it would make them inseparable from all issues relating to the subjects at hand. I therefore believe it leads to the situation where most pupils continue on into the working world to develop both their careers and lives around a perspective and world-view that lacks inclusion of the questions of our responsibility to the world around us. Instead our perspectives focus on the short-term gains our work can create, where responsibility is becomes a question of efficiency that can easily be disregarded rather than it becoming an inner part of our being. An unfortunate fact that can be brought back to how we have been learning to learn ever since the first day we entered a classroom.

Human Ecology on the other hand brings us one means for integrating the principles of responsibility and sustainability into the educational systems of the world from today on. Human Ecology takes a multidisciplinary approach to education through the art of problem understanding and problem solving from a lens that tries to incorporate as many disciplines and stake-holder world-views as possible. It is an approach to education that integrates its core principles of high human morals and values in action, responsible and sustainable thinking, compassion, and the drive to question everything from as many perspectives as possible. The Human Ecological education model is a good choice for encouraging change because these values are taught as though they are inseparable from any aspect of ones’ education and life. The challenge becomes a matter of teaching pupils to embrace these values in their day-to-day lives rather than continue to separate them into metaphors of what an idealistic world might look like in our dreams. And to me, it is a challenge that I believe is it quite doable.

As far-fetched and Utopian as it all might sound though–that is to have a world where we respect our responsibility and make choices only after considerable thought has been put into understanding the effects of each choice we make and are consistently choosing the option most sustainable over the long-term–consider the fact that even young children are able to learn such concepts even before they can read. Authors of children’s books around the world have taken the lead in ensuring that children are taught how to be responsible from as early an age as their parents begin to read to them. Even the most simple of bed-time stories and fairy tales have general themes such as proper disposal of and the minimization of waste, cause and effect, staying healthy, respecting others and the like that are seamlessly woven in and out of the texts. Each one teaches children how to simply be responsible and treat the world with love in their own way. They also teach them how to live and act sustainably. They learn to take care of themselves, while also taking care of the world in which they live. Eat green vegetables more than those that come from a can, keep your environment clean, help others, treat them in the way you would like to be treated, recognize the effects of your choices and choose wisely, do not be a bully, do not make things or say things that could hurt others, etc. Which leads me to believe that the challenge of raising a new generation of youth that grows up with the mentality of sustainable living and responsibility through choice is indeed feasible. We just need to dedicate ourselves to keeping these themes in all the texts we read, whether for night-time tales or mathematical and scientific text-books.

To clarify and conclude, I would again like to mention that I do not intend to suggest that the Human Ecological perspective is the final solution to the world’s problems. Rather, I believe that many seeds of possibility lie within Human Ecology for building a more conscientious world. Those which could sprout to form the strong, sustainable roots the world needs to disrupt the growth of destructive consumption, and immoral and inhuman technological progress. The development of science and technology will very soon be in the maturing hands of the coming generations. If we intend to improve the outlook of our future, they must be prepared to meet the increasing demands of responsibility that progressing technologies create. We must show others too that it is in everyone’s best interest for them to do the same and must not just stop there. Sustainability and responsibility must become part of who we are as humans, and with Human Ecology this is accessible to all.