Signs from children
Signs are what Humans leave in their Activities:
Memory, Communication, Ideas.
Signs rely on Media and can be Collected by Type and Topic.
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A Selection of the Signs that Kids leave, across Space and Time, from the Experience of Operators who bring them together on an efficient platform.
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A Collection, Projects and Workshops, all around the World, connected one to another, for our collective Memory and Knowledge, towards the Future!
A Multimedia Living Book to be written together
Until a few years ago, Signs were accessible only in real sites and situations and they could be reproduced for the grand public only by the owners of the publishing and mass media. We were used to live in a World divided into Producers and Consumers, also of Information.
Kids' Signs (drawings, texts, video interviews or documentation) had a few space in books, exhibitions, TV programs. To make people know what children do and think we had to copy down and print their words or interview them, but it seldom happened, and almost all we knew, as a society, about kids was told us by adults, teachers, psychologists, sociologists, journalists.
Today, technology do not only allow people to chat on social networks or to enjoy the services of the big companies, but also to share and know by ourselves almost directly, as never before in history, signs and documents produced by everyone, kids included. This is a very recent opportunity that most people have not yet realized.
Sharing Signs and Products, not only Didactic
I already put, in the past, on some books the exact words of kids, taken with recorders and video cameras, thinking that, speaking in those cases of body expression and theatre, environment, computers, not only didactic is important, that is how to teach what we already know, but also and maybe more the living responses of children. We can learn much from them!
In this rough site I begin from my own experience and of very few other collaborators. The idea is to go beyond the simple storage of documents, the reporting of tools or “news” from the digital market. We need to know latest activities as well as past experiences often very innovative but unknown, and to learn from all them. Future is impossible without history!
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Let's find things
We think of a final Web Platform, Topic and Tag Oriented, where people can easily find documents and compare them.
This site is to give a first idea, to suggest around to professionals of education and programmers what we could do together.
We'll correct things along the way, as indications from correspondents arrive. While others will work on the real site.
In the meantime we can begin, starting from words and categories, searching for things...
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Examples of productions by under 14
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To try to manage the huge amount of documents we produce and receive, it can be viewed as a huge task! But in nowadays times, without going beyond the old habits of individual consumption, we cannot be but overwhelmed by a charge of information we cannot stand, and so also the growing immersion in technology often decreases, instead of improving, our control on the reality. So, getting used to select, choose, put things in order, not leaving everything to the “market”, it can be important.
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In my long career, for example, I collected a lot of documents that, reviewed, selected, indexed, could tell something interesting. But, as many others have similar collections, if the platform and the indexing are good, using the features of the web we can easily put 10, 100, 1000 and more experiences all together… And whole worlds can be opened wide!
In my humble opinion, this is probably much more useful and exciting than only for example reviewing , in scattered sites, blogs and social network pages the latest piece of software, or publishing tutorials for works to be done, individually, in single schools and that probably never will be shared and known.
A good platform for working together
Now I am asking to programmers to set up a good platform made to work and to colleagues to share a selected part of their experience, as I'm beginning to do here, to build the foundations for a common work. Not only mine, yours, his, group, in competition, but active citizens for a future on a human scale, of cooperation and peace. That does not mean only to do things for free, as when people meet and work together, responding to society's needs, useful services for quality of life are given, wealth is produced and socially useful jobs can be created.
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Paolo Beneventi
