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This has been a quiet blogging week due to FLACSO México’s visit to the University of Minnesota. The visit has been very busy, and highly productive.

This morning, Education Futures contributor Dr. Cristóbal Cobo (read his blog) presented his ideas at a University of Minnesota’s Institute for New Media Studies and Digital Technology Center research breakfast on his new book, Planet Web 2.0: Collective Intelligence or Fast Food Media (English translation). The event was also webcast by the University’s Supercomputing Institute. (A link to the recorded video will be posted when it becomes available.)

A debate followed the presentation on the roles and values of online technologies. Most puzzling for academicians in the audience was how might reconcile the need for producing peer-reviewed, “academic” publications with freely available, open material. Whereas a journal article might solicit a handful of readers, an open document might bring in thousands more (for example, Planet 2.0, which was issued under a Creative Commons license, has already registered over 61,000 downloads in the first few weeks since its release). Our promotion and tenure process, however, recognizes only publications that appear in traditional print media. Why?

At the end of the event, Dr. Cobo was approached regarding an open sourced effort toward translating the book from Spanish to English by the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies. Planeta 2.0 approaches…!

Cristóbal Cobo writes that his book, co-authored with Hugo Pardo, “Planeta Web 2.0, ¿Inteligencia colectiva o medios fast food?” (Planet Web 2.0: Collective intelligence or fast food?) is available for download under a Creative Commons license. In this volume, Cobo and Pardo reflect on whether the Web 2.0 trend is a creative phase, based on collective intelligence, or if the phenomena is simply another manifestation of fast food culture –or, if the trend is characteristic of a new evolutionary stage.

Cobo will discuss his book at an event sponsored by the Institute for New Media Studies at the University of Minnesota on October 3. I’ll post more details when they emerge…

We’re back this week with the final five top ten lists! Today’s list contains tools and Web resources to help people start leapfrogging now.

Note: It’s hard to create an innovative tools top ten list while omitting services from Google – but, for the purpose of this list, Google is left off because everybody wants to be like Google. Why be like Google when you can leapfrog the industry?

1. GNU/Linux: It’s open. It’s free. It works. And, it’s very well supported.
2. Tom at Sky Blue Waters believes no leapfrogger can get by without a proper RSS feed to quickly digest and disseminate information.
3. WordPress: Get your message out and solicit reponses with the best blogging tool out there.
4. Wikimedia or other open knowledge-based software to quickly publish your stuff and open it for public additions, corrections, or (if necessary) deletions. Wikimedia is the platform that powers Wikipedia and Wikiversity.
5. Second Life, World of Warcraft, Croquet and other virtual environments for building new social contexts, experiences and for trying out things you can’t get away with in the real world.
6. Skype: You’ll want to talk a lot to others around the world. Why not do it for free or almost free?
7. Old skool media (also available on the Web): New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, etc., etc., etc…
8. Social bookmarking (e.g., del.icio.us): Find new ideas and resources, share them with others, and learn more along the way.
9. Creative Commons licensing: Mark your creative work with the freedoms you want it to carry.
10. Finally, if the resources you need aren’t out there, create your own. Need help? Consider building a team online.

Via the marvelous Web 2.0 technology of trackbacks, I saw that Cristobal Cobo posted a link back here, along with a truly fantastic video:

Read Cobo’s original post… or, for my quick-and-dirty translation of his thoughts from Spanish:

“Building on the past”
video by Justin Cone for the Moving Images Contest

What Moravec names open source culture is exactly what Creative Commons promotes. This video renders tribute to this culture of open interchange. From this short [video] which I found in resiliencia_estratégica, it connects me to a long list of videos that explain of diverse forms of this principle of the opening and collectivization of knowledge.

Examples: mirrors.creativecommons, support.creativecommons.org and one.revver.com.

In addition, for anyone who is interested in something more academic, here is an extra: the video of Lawrence Lessig in Argentina, founder of Creative Commons and main proponent of [Creative Commons] licenses at a world-wide level …and his presentation in Colombia.