GnuEducacion

We just started this holiday season a site for Education Research based on opensource or free software. If you read Spanish go to:

GnuEducacion

This is going to succeed.

We need to understand the present moment in technological development, together with the HUGE political and social changes going on all over the place.

Here I make an initial effort to understand this historic moment.

We are in the very beginning of the new millennium. Among other things, this means that there are two thousand years of continuous cultural development. I can only think of the two thousand year Egyptian Empire, as a possible comparison.

I believe that society is the product of continuous human activity. Social practices get embedded in social conventions. If you sell the same product for a higher price, breaking public trust, your peers will isolate you and you will fail. The US broke the trust of humanity. Right now Israel is bombing Hamas leaders, together with the poor Palestinians living in the Gaza strip. The Israeli people, blinded by fear, do not see the injustice of killing one hundred poor people, for each rich person they save.

I am not an Islamist, neither am I a Cristero, the Mexican version of the same mental disease; but I see that if an Israeli citizen believes that it is OK to kill one hundred enemies to save one friend, Islamists are going to proliferate.

Here in Mexico we are going through our own version of a low intensity war. In Chilpancingo today we learn that some drunken soldiers were arrested in front of the City military barracks, in a bar where they were drinking. This is the closest to a war situation I have experienced in my country. In 1968, there were not enough weapons to empower poor people. Now if Islamists can send homemade rockets to Israel, Mexican drug dealers can burn cars in front of the Guerrero State capital military barracks. That action is as close to a declaration of war that I have seen here.

Robert Fisk, as you can read in this blog, has been reminding us of the dangers entailed in seeing the "other" as less than human. Any human being will respond with all their intelligence and knowledge to a threat on his or her life.

That is all the social law that I understand, "treat others, as you would like others to treat you". To me that is almost a tautology, the only one that can harm us, is another human being.

I read today that Nicholas Negroponte is having a hard time with his enlightened efforts to provide poor people with more tools to make a living. Hugo Chávez from Venezuela, signed an agreement with the Portuguese Government to provide enough laptops and communication infrastructure for a cultural and technical revolution of his people.

I believe that only through science and technological progress will we get out of these trying times we are going through.

Please join us in these efforts to start the new millennium successfully.