Gunnar Wolf

This is an update to my last post regarding the «Construcción Colaborativa del Conocimiento» book.

The book is, as we have repeatedly stated, available online for download — Both as a full PDF or chapter by chapter. In the website you will also find videos of all of the conferences held.

But holding a printed book in your hands is just a different experience, isn't it? :-) Anyway, I said I would give here an update on how to get your hands on it. The main venue would be through my University's e-store. I recommend it to anybody interested in buying the book in Mexico. The book's list price is MX$300 (around US$27), but it is currently sold at half price — I don't know how long will that price be offered.

On the other hand, we also uploaded it to the lulu.com self-publishing service. Of course, given I have not seen the printed results, I cannot assure you the resulting product will be of the same quality as the one we got here, but I have a couple of books I have bought at lulu, and their quality is quite acceptable. So, you can also buy it from lulu.com. Note the 20% discount it shows will be permanent — That's what I would get as an author, a payment I decided to forefit given we are 11 authors and it would be unfair to collect it all myself. So, the price at lulu.com is US$12.64 plus shipping — Very similar to the price at UNAM.

Enjoy!

Finally!

Last Friday, after two years worth of work, I finally got the first box of books for the Construcción Colaborativa del Conocimiento (Collaborative Knowledge Construction) project I worked on as a coordinator together with Alejandro Miranda (pooka), and together with a large group of 11 authors:

Translating over from the back cover text (and this is just a quick translation from me — It reads better in Spanish ;-) ):

What defines us as humans is our ability, on one side, to
create knowledge, and on the other, to share or communicate it with our neighbors. Both features have worked together over tens of thousands of years, and, working together, have led the knowledge to transcend the individual, avoiding the need to rediscovery or reinvention of is already known. Sharing knowledge is what has taken our species to the dominant role it occupies today.

But knowledge creation and sharing has seen a deep transformation in recent decades, thanks to the quick evolution of telecommunications, specially the massification of Internet and cellular telephony. We are transiting towards the so desired –and at the same time so feared– knowledge society.

In this book, eleven authors from very different disciplinary backgrounds and geographic origins ellaborate on how a hyper-connected world has modified the basic rules of interaction in areas as diverse as artistic creation, social organizations, computer code development, education or the productive sector.

This book is the result of a year worth of work for in the "Collaborative Construction of Knowledge" seminar, during which we
used the same new forms of knowledge production we have studied.

The videos of the sessions, electronic participations and the full contents of this book are available under a permisive license at
http://seminario.edusol.info/seco3/

We will soon have the book ready in IIEc's e-store (which is mostly meant for national requests). I am also uploading the book to the lulu.com self-publishing service, and we are working on a epub-like edition. Right now it is still not available, but it should be there in some days. I will keep you posted.

Meanwhile, the full contents can be read online at http://seminario.edusol.info/seco3

As I'm not currently working on any suitable paper, I'll just post this to my blog so it does not completely slip off my radar ;-) Also, it might be interesting to my reader. Readers? Oh, there are two of you now? Good!

Yesterday, I learnt thanks to Beatriz Busaniche that a group of South American Free Culture activists launched number zero of a magazine that promises to be very interesting: Cultura RWX, cultura en modo lectura, escritura y acción (culture in reading, writing and action mode). Guys, best luck with this new project!

Anyway, reading it, I found this asseveration I want to keep at hand:

(…)cuando surge la industria musical aparecen los derechos de autor como forma de defensa de los productores musicales, específicamente los músicos. No tanto frente a los usuarios, porque hasta el “cassette” no existió posibilidad de copiar una obra musical. Era una defensa frente a las discográficas, que buscaban cerrar contratos muchas veces abusivos con los artistas.

— Música en Libertad: La industria musical frente al cambio de paradigma; Matías Lennie, adaptación: Sebastián Vazquez

Yes, yes, translating to English:

(…)when the musical industry was born, copyright appeared as a means of defense of the musical producers, specifically of the musicians. Not so much against the users, because up until the invention of the “cassette” there was no possibility to copy a musical creation. It was a defense against the discographic companies, which tried to close often abusive contracts with the artists.

Music in Freedom: Musical industry and the paradigm shift; Matías Lennie, adaptation: Sebastián Vázquez

I have argued (i.e. in here) in this same line regarding the birth of copyright itself — It was an arrangement that had to be made between writers and printers, back in the XVI/XVII centuries. Simple individuals were just unable to get anything of value out of the copying technology they had at hand.

Copyright was born in a time where reproduction required specialized equipment. Today, massive reproduction technology is a given for a good portion of the planet's population. Copyright now only defends big corporations — And will inevitably fade away as anachronic. Of course, it refuses to go without a fight... But it cannot win long-term. We cannot afford to allow it!