In this post, we'll introduce our panasona project and why we think it fulfills an urgent need from teachers looking to add interactive educational tools for their teaching blogs that are free and, by virtue of not needing complex and costly servers and hosting infrastructure, can be deployed by just about any educator with a simple free blog (ie blogger).
The coronavirus pandemic has disrupted the entire planet. Virtually all countries have implemented lock-downs that severely restrict mobility and there doesn't seem to be an immediate end in sight for the quarantine, since that would require detecting and separating the infected/susceptible populations. However, this poses a formidable logistics problem.
We are now in the Twilight Zone
A lock-down of indefinitely long duration will have significant impact on the structure of our work space and our home and entertainment spaces. In particular, educational spaces are the most directly affected and as schools and universities shut down, the coronavirus finds the vast majority of educators unprepared in transitioning from their physical classrooms to virtual distance learning environments. Many are simply improvising and the existing technological tools at their disposal do little to help ease their heavier workload in these virtual learning environments.
On the other hand, the coronavirus pandemic is not the ultimate cause of this shift to virtual learning environments, it just represents a historic point of convergence of many other factors leading us into this e-learning paradigm. Another aspect worth considering is that the pandemic has revealed not only the incapacity of public institutions to guarantee adequate health care during such an emergency, but also the ineffectiveness of educational institutions to meet this challenge, most of which have saddled individual teachers with this responsibility.
Our basic premises here are that e-learning distance education environments are here to stay and that it is the individual teachers working from their homes, and not traditional schools and universities, who will become the new protagonists in this new educational setting. With this in mind, we have launched our panasona project.
panasona is an open source project uniting developers and educators, aimed at facilitating virtual distance learning environments through the development of free tools for on-line instruction and assessment that:
We are now in the Twilight Zone
A lock-down of indefinitely long duration will have significant impact on the structure of our work space and our home and entertainment spaces. In particular, educational spaces are the most directly affected and as schools and universities shut down, the coronavirus finds the vast majority of educators unprepared in transitioning from their physical classrooms to virtual distance learning environments. Many are simply improvising and the existing technological tools at their disposal do little to help ease their heavier workload in these virtual learning environments.
On the other hand, the coronavirus pandemic is not the ultimate cause of this shift to virtual learning environments, it just represents a historic point of convergence of many other factors leading us into this e-learning paradigm. Another aspect worth considering is that the pandemic has revealed not only the incapacity of public institutions to guarantee adequate health care during such an emergency, but also the ineffectiveness of educational institutions to meet this challenge, most of which have saddled individual teachers with this responsibility.
Our basic premises here are that e-learning distance education environments are here to stay and that it is the individual teachers working from their homes, and not traditional schools and universities, who will become the new protagonists in this new educational setting. With this in mind, we have launched our panasona project.
panasona is an open source project uniting developers and educators, aimed at facilitating virtual distance learning environments through the development of free tools for on-line instruction and assessment that:
- leverage productivity and reach of teachers, while leveling the playing field between individual teachers and corporate institutions with large human resources, servers and computing infrastructure and financial capital.
- place individual educators - and not collective educational institutions - as the fundamental agents of the educational process, respecting the teachers autonomy in the classroom and revindicating the virtual classroom (the teacher's blog) as the teacher's own intellectual property.
- favor agile and incremental development of educational blogs to meet the challenge of swiftly transitioning to virtual on-line learning environments.
