The quarterly magazine of the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya

Cristóbal Schmal

Sir Berners-Lee and the African journalist / Vicent Partal

There is an image that has fascinated me for years. It is Tim Berners-Lee’s first draft on what we would come to know as the World Wide Web. It is a simple paper, just like thousands that are written around the world every day. A diagram illustrates how Mesh, the first name that the creator of the web dreamt up for his new invention, would work.

No human activity is immune
to the mindboggling yet
creative impact of the web

Journalists in the Internet
age have to be part of the
circulating chaos of the information

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Jean Daniel. An everyday historian / Àlex Vicente

Lea Crespi

To me, journalism is a profession which requires three talents: to gather information, to give due consideration to this information and to know how to put it across. As if that weren’t enough, we have to carry out this process before other people, with the obsession for speed that is a determining factor of our job. Journalism means breaking records on a permanent basis.

“Power is an enemy in disguise:
it seduces you, makes you drowsy,
anaesthetises you”

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Jessica Colaço. Mobile-technology ‘evangelist’ in Africa / Leo Ruffini

David Campos

Demolishing clichés is something that drives Jessica Colaço. To prove, for instance, that Africa “isn’t synonymous with hunger and wars” but is, instead, “a market with a huge potential for SMS-based applications”, and that Kenya, a place many people only associate with the jungle and safaris, is becoming “a centre for innovation and technology”.

Colaço has been named one
of the 40 most influential women
under 40 in Kenya

“The mobile phone is a decisive
instrument for development in
Africa”

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Carlos Albaladejo talks with Jack Dorsey

David Campos

If you catch all the taxis in Barcelona and ask them to tell you where they’re going and what they’re doing you will get a virtually complete visual map of what is going on in the city. But this map would miss the people, the actual citizens, my friends. From there I got the idea to work on a prototype of Twitter in the year 2000, based on a Blackberry, which worked via e-mail.

“Twitter allows huge organisations
which people can’t understand to get
on a level with their customers”

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The EcoUniversity /Eduard Vinyamata

Universities have an implicit duty: to make this world a better place. Scientific and technological knowledge must be placed at the service of people and the societies they live in: it must make people and societies live in peace, safety and justice; it must ensure freedom, health and welfare; and it must make our environment healthy and ensure that natural resources are not depleted. But this does not always happen when knowledge is not explicitly used for the common good.

Humanity and Nature must be
the core and mission of universities
and scientific endeavours

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Arianne Faber

Renewable energy’s time is now
Andris Piebalgs

“We are the first generation to realize the scale of the problems posed by global warming. The most comprehensive study of the economics of climate change that I know of was carried out by Nicholas Stern for the British Treasury. He concluded that the cost of inaction was substantially greater than the cost of action. The total costs of inaction could be between 5% and 20% of lost GDP every year. These are extraordinarily high numbers, much greater than the proportions of GDP lost by economic slowdown.”

Energy efficiency is one of the least
costly ways of reducing our impact
on the environment

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Guy Haug. “Those against the Bologna process don’t know exactly what they’re opposing” / Ester Medico

David Campos

“The Bologna process isn’t an EU initiative. It grew out of meetings between ministres and universities in Europe. It would only be obligatory if laws and royal decrees and agreements were made at a state level. There is no “Bologna Plan”. There are certain framework agreements which point us in certain strategic directions and Spain has participated at every stage of the process of developing the agreements.”

“In the 1990s Europe lost the privilege of being
the destination of choice for students and academics”

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Haruki Murakami. “When I write, I travel to the dark side of the brain”
Albert Nolla

David Campos

When the conversation drifted towards his literature, Murakami explained that what he does when he writes is travel to the dark side of the brain, and that he doesn’t always like what he finds; it repels or scares him, but he feels compelled to write about it because it exists.

“Afterwards,” he added with his proverbial irony, “I always come back, because I’m a professional and if I didn’t there wouldn’t be any novels.”

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Hilal Can

Educating in times of uncertainty
Salvador Cardús i Ros

Can we educate without knowing where the society on behalf of which and for which we are educating is going? If the future has become so uncertain that it is not easy for us to make predictions even one year ahead – the recent crisis has shown this emphatically and definitively – how can we determine the educational needs of new generations whose world is so wide open that we cannot even imagine it?

Now that everyone has recognised
the strategic importance of education,
it is experiencing the greatest identity
crisis in its history

We must educate individuals who
are profoundly aware of their social
responsibilities

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Zygmunt Bauman. Generation Y / Josep Maria Mominó

David Campos

He is the father of the theory of liquid modernity, a metaphor that he uses to refer to the changing, fleeting condition of today’s society, which is characterised by individualism, consumerism and the instability of personal relationships. A lucid, hyperactive octogenarian, last year Zygmunt Bauman closed the Debates on Education held by the UOC and the Jaume Bofill Foundation with a talk entitled “Education in the World of the Diasporas”. He underscored the fact that intergenerational communication today is conditioned by the existence of a virtual world parallel to the physical world and governed by its own rules.

“The world of harsh and unnegotiable
realities is a totally foreign country for
a great many young people”

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Derrick de Kerckhove, McLuhan’s Heir / Jordi Rovira

David Campos

In his office in Barcelona, De Kerckhove analyses the most significant aspects of communication today. And when he does so, gesticulating and laughing, he cannot hide the fact that at 64 he still speaks with all the passion of someone who thoroughly enjoys his work. References to Marshall McLuhan, who revolutionized the theory of communication and with whom he worked for ten years, are constant. “McLuhan would not be very surprised by the latest technology”, he says, and goes on to point out that in 1962 his master predicted phenomena such as the global encyclopaedia Wikipedia.

“Digitalization has put an end
to the dictatorship of television”

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Digital tunnels in Gaza. Palestinian and Israeli dissent on the Web / Montserrat Arbós

Yudit Ilany

On the 28th of December of last year, the second day of Operation Cast Lead against the Gaza Strip, Sameh Habeeb began a detailed daily war diary on his blog entitled From Gaza: Suffering Like Gazans, which he would keep up until the end of the offensive. “300 dead while up to 1,000 wounded, around 80 air raids, 2 mosques bombed in Khan Yonis City, 24 homemade light rockets fired from Gaza hit Asklon and Ashdod leaving a few wounded...(...) In addition, Gazans are still out of gas, power and bread!”

“That’s what reality was like, getting small bits and pieces of news at all hours, phones, demos; there was something very overwhelming about it, for me at least. Often it was difficult to understand the bigger picture, as everything was very fractured” Yudit Ilany

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Joan Negrescolor

The toxic legacy inherited by Obama
Lluís Bassets

Few presidents of the United States have had to face such a complicated situation as the one that Barack Hussein Obama has encountered when taking office as the president in Washington on the 20th of January in the solemn ceremony of Inauguration. Two wars currently being fought in Iraq and Afghanistan and a rampant recession are the main issues that the new president finds on his desk.

The first priority is to ban
the counter-terrorist practices
that endorse torture

The presidential mansion built
by slave labour will be the home
to a black family as its masters

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Manuel Castells. The Obama revolution / Ester Medico

David Campos

Barack Obama, the first black president of the US, takes office thanks to the support of an important majority of society. Among them, the young, women, new voters and Afro-American and Latino minorities stand out. Their support led to his resounding victory on the 4th of November – 52.5% of the popular vote and 365 electoral votes, compared to the 46.2% and 173 won by the Republican John McCain. He enters office in the midst of a deep-rooted economic crisis of unforeseeable consequences, and of complex social and political challenges around the world.

“The most important and innovative aspect
of Obama’s campaign was the use of Internet”

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Timothy Berners-Lee, the inventor of the WWW / Leo Ruffini

David Campos

Sir Timothy Berners-Lee (London, 1955) is the living embodiment of the old adage that fame and brilliance do not always go hand in hand. Barely known on the street – all it takes is a brief survey to prove it – he has neverthless contributed hugely to making our world the way we know it today.

Berners-Lee is the creator of the World Wide Web. It took place at CERN (European Organisation for Nuclear Research) on Christmas Day 1990 when, with the help of Robert Cailliau and a young team of students, he managed to establish the first connection between a server and an http client via Internet.

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