Professor Curtis BonkSocial Media looms large in the cyber world and for those who aren’t familiar with it…it can be a terrifying and expansive frontier. Professor Curtis Bonk has created navigational tools to help users embrace WEB 2.0, and other types of Social Media. He’s written the compelling book, The World is Open, which demonstrates just how open, with the use of the internet, the world can be.
The idea of the book came from Bonk’s need of a topic for a keynote speech hey gave. “I came up with a talk, and it was called ‘Oops, I didn’t mean to share that.’ Oops is a project [one that is written in Ch. 5 of his book] about the volunteers who translate MIT, and other OCW [OpenCourseWare] projects into Chinese."
“In [Ch. 5] I talk about Lucifer Chu, who translated The Lord of the Rings and made more than a million dollars and then donated half of the money towards translating MIT courses into simplified, and traditional, Chinese. He used his personal wealth for the good of mankind. So Oops became my first key note on the parallel trends I saw happening. I began to assemble all the information I could gather from my friends and research, and it ended up being about open education.”
What led Bonk to writing the book? “Everyday we are overwhelmed with all this information and education. Chu and his team are working hard at translating all this free content from M.I.T. Most M.I.T classes are now available online for free. When the earthquake hit China, Chu used his knowledge of the internet and gathered people to translate texts on survival.” The ability to provide shared knowledge to those in need motivated Chu and Bonk.
WE ALL LEARN is the premise of Bonk’s book. Using that acronym, readers can all learn the various ways to navigate the web to promote themselves, their businesses or to simply enjoy the various avenues that online reality provides.
“I had my keynote, but I didn’t have a book like this, to back it up. I felt like I had to sit at home for a year and write the book. I ended up writing two books. The second one will be an eBook, and it’s free. It’s for people who want to learn beyond the first book, or can’t afford to buy the book.
“Open Software is the language of the web,” according to Bonk, and “sharing knowledge” is the ultimate goal. “WE ALL LEARN is a framework, so that people are not overwhelmed.
“There are so many ways, and things to learn, like learning a language online. Live Mocha is a matchmaking service for language learning. You can also sign up to be a teacher. Anyone can learn anything from anyone else at any time with the online medias.” The internet offers so much to everyone; you just have to learn where to look.
“You can get tutored from people anywhere. I think students will [one day] walk into school, and they will have a huge screen that sits at the front of the class room. If the teacher is absent for the day, they will click on the screen and choose someone to teach class from anywhere in the world.”
The internet, and social media, can often garner an underdeveloped opinion from people who don’t completely understand both sides of the coin. While it may not be the best idea to spend all your hours interacting solely by way of online community (a little sunlight does the body good), there are wonderful possibilities to be found online.
“There is a guy in Bloomington who watched his son get ready for the SATs, and saw him struggle in certain areas. He developed a website, called Free Rice, for his son to develop his vocabulary. Every time someone visits the site and gets a question, or vocab word correct, the site will direct ten grains of rice to be donated to a third world country.
“You do not need the internet to be impacted by the Internet. You just need a foundation or organization located in your community or neighborhood which is impacted by it through people signing up online to donate time, resources, talent, etc.” Bonk illustrates this in his book. “If something doesn’t fit the framework, ignore it. These [the WE ALL LEARN points] are openers, but you get to use the ones you want.
“People don’t normally think about the things that technology does that haven’t been done before. My book is an attempt to nudge people along in this direction toward a more free and open educational world.” That is the exciting part – the possibilities that the internet, and social media, create.
To learn more of the possibilities the World Wide Web provides, visit Professor Curtis Bonk’s website at: http://worldisopen.com/
Or pick up a copy of The World is Open, out now!
Comments
Nice article! Open information brakes barriers and increases instruction levels and standards. The more free and available information the better. I believe language instruction is the first step to bring people from different parts of the world closer and makes information exchanges more accessible. There is another free language learning website combined with a social networking coming up as well www.hello-hello.com
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