World University Project Halts Operations

Due to volunteer capacity issues, the World University Project is halting operations.

The last few years have been a fantastic time for us. We have met so many wonderful people passionate about education around the world. We were excited about telling your stories and keen to see those stories shape the picture of higher education in our time of unprecedented growth.

Unfortunately, despite the great progress made with projects such as UniLives.com, we have been unable to match our aspirations with the required volunteer capacity. Consequently, we are ending operations. We remain open to ideas from third parties on how to revive and achieve UniLives.com.

Thanks for your encouragement and support over the years.

J. Nathan Matias
Executive Producer,
World University Project

UniLives.com uploads from Monday 16 Nov

Whew! The last month has been a busy one for us, both in our personal lives and in the World University Project. In addition to our work here, the volunteer team has been busy finishing up PhDs, starting PhDs, working on product launches for employers, taking care of kids with the flu, and getting used to working life after graduation.

Despite these challenges, we have made great progress and expect to expand UniLives.com on Monday. Starting next week, students from around the world will be able to upload videos about their university lives.

You can help us make this site a success. Although the technology will be in place on Monday, we want to develop a core set of content before we try to make a splash with events and press releases. If you know if great videos, or you have friends in universities outside of the USA or the UK, suggest they check out UniLives.com and contact us. We would love to feature their videos!

Thanks to everyone who has worked so hard to bring us to this point, *and* who are putting in a lot of time this weekend for the final touches.

–J. Nathan Matias
Executive Producer
World University Project

UniLives.com launched

What a beautiful thing. Thanks everyone!

Times Higher Ed Partners with the World University Project

Automattic, Inc. Sponsors University Lives Collection

Cambridge, UK 11 September 2009 — The World University Project (WUP), a charitable trust based in Cambridge, today announced a sponsorship agreement with Automattic Inc., best known for its contribution to WordPress, the open source blogging platform. Automattic will provide the technology platform and hosting for the University Lives Collection, an initiative to publish video snapshots of student experience worldwide.

“Automattic is the perfect sponsor,” says J. Nathan Matias, Executive Producer of the World University Project. “They have a fabulous reputation for quality and integrity in online publishing. VideoPress is great for processing and publishing footage from students with varied technologies worldwide. We can use PollDaddy to conduct student surveys. And our globally-distributed team of volunteers can use the WordPress.com platform to work together on the project wherever we are.”

Automattic will be providing WordPress.com and VideoPress VIP hosting for the University Lives Collection. During the 2009-10 academic year, students will be invited to submit short films about student experience, the role of education in their society, and other key education issues in their region. In the summer of 2010, prizes will be awarded to the best submissions, and the films will be published together as an interactive documentary on global student experience.

The World University Project is a charitable trust founded by international students at Cambridge, Oxford, and Anglia Ruskin universities to advance the understanding and development of higher education around the world. WUP uses online film and interactive documentary to bring global voices into debate on education issues.

The University Lives Collection will go online in November 2009.

For more information:

The World University Project:  www.WorldUniversityProject.org

Automattic, Inc.: automattic.com

CONTACT:

World University Project
J. Nathan Matias
44 7985 747 444

University Lives Collection Page Launched

In December 2008, in a trustees meeting, we discussed ways to get more students involved, and collect student-produced material from places we won’t be able to visit on our film trips.

Drawing inspiration from The Davos Question and the Great War Archive, we started planning an initiative to collect films from students worldwide, no matter the digital format, and to pose a set of questions about university experience which could tie them together.

Over the past 7 months, we have brought together some very strong operational and strategic partners, and applied for grant funding. The University Lives Collection is the result of all of those conversations.

If we can obtain funding or sponsors for the hosting and marketing, we should be able to reach out to around 5,000 universities worldwide to create a snapshot of worldwide student experience in our time.

If you have any suggestions or ideas, if you would like to help out, or sponsor the project, please contact us at planning@worlduniversityproject.org. One of our project managers will get in touch.

Special thanks goes out to Gloria Dawson, who turned this project from a set of vague ideas into a real initiative, to Jussi Parrika at ARCDigital for enthusiastic, helpful conversations, and to Dave Millard at ECS for helping us figure out the technology, and work out how to make grant proposals. The lead project manager for the University Lives Collection is Joshua Blanchard-Lewis.

Cyber City: Can Outsourcing Bootstrap Innovation?

Mauritius is attempting to turn a history of European colonisation into business opportunities with the recent construction of a “Cyber City” in Moka, a few km outside the capital of Port Louis. But it remains to be seen if the education promoted by call-centres and other business process outsourcing (BPO) is the right stepping stone to domestic economic growth.

Until recently, Mauritius had a limited professional sector. To tourism, sugar, fishing, textiles, and financial services, they now wish to add Internet/Communication Technology (ICT). The Mauritian government is funding the necessary education and technology infrastructure with help from foreign companies. In return, these companies get lower taxes and some influence over workforce training.  The government hopes that Mauritian business will develop, led by Mauritians trained in foreign-owned companies, using infrastructure those companies helped create.

The city of Moka has a history foreign education partnerships. It is the home of the Mahatma Gandhi Institute, founded in partnership with the Indian Government in 1970,  The institute, with help from the University of Mauritius, is now attempting to become a university. Moka is also the site of the (very exciting) University of Technology of Mauritius (UTM), founded in 2000, just as the government began plans to make technology outsourcing a major focus of economic development. UTM has been working closely with a number of BPO companies to obtain resources for growth.

So far, things look good. The infrastructure is in place, the schools are functioning, and foreign businesses are expanding. While tourism is down as a result of the recession (1) (2), this places even more importance on the growth of more resilient sectors.

As a software engineer working on BPO systems, I see large differences between my job description and the tasks of those who use our software. If BPOs in Maurutius or any country are to result in domestic entrepreneurship,  it will result when hard-working people put their education and infrastructure to uses far beyond the tasks required by foreign employers.

Postfix: That’s why the World University Project centers on student-produced media and interviews from around the world. Theories and policies are helpful, but it is the spirit of the faculty and students themselves which define a place and its potential. We need their views and our own first-hand observations if we are to move beyond the shallow understanding promoted by marketing and press releases (more about the World University Documentary ).

–J. Nathan Matias
Executive Producer

More about Mauritius, Mauritian Education, and BPOs:

• BBC Article about Cyber City (2003).
• Stanford University Library Resources on Mauritius
• UN Case Study on Mauritius and Development Goals
• Mauritian National Computer Board, which initiated “Cyber Island” plans
• Presentation on BPOs to the UN Economic Commission for Africa by a representative of the National Computer Board (disclaimer: EuroCRM has ties with the company that owns my employer)
• Articles like this suggest that some in Mauritius see working with the UN and World Economic Forum as a marketing opportunity- putting the Internet in post offices, for example, is an inexpensive way to push up development indicators.
• Mauritius is an island of many languages. The prolific writer Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Literature, has strong family ties to Mauritius (as well as Nigeria).
• No discussion of BPOs can exclude discussion of India. In this Times of India debate, hundreds of Indian readers argue over the social impact of the greater wealth and independence young people gain by working for an outsourcing company.
• Mauritius is one of the wealthier countries in Africa, coming higher on the Human Development Index than Russia- right between Belarus and Bosnia. Elsewhere, large companies and NGOs alike are experimenting with rural BPOs outside the traditional urban setting. This is good for communities- and on initial survey, it seems to be very good for business. (1) (2) (3) (4) (relevant google searches: [1], [2], [3])

Volunteer Event in Cambridge, UK

Presentation at St John’s College, Cambridge 17 Feb 2008

Executive Producer J. Nathan Matias will be one of two speakers in a series of graduate-student talks at St. John’s College, Cambridge. He will be speaking about recent global growth in university education, the team’s experiences in Libya, and plans for the future. Those of you in Cambridge, just ask for the “Fischer Building” at the Great Gate porter’s lodge of St. John’s. The event is at 7:30pm.

Carl Scheffler, one of the documentary team members, spoke at the last talk in this series, about his experiences setting up FabLabs and internet connections at a school in Afghanistan.

Documentary Format Demo Online

Last autumn, Carl Scheffler and Nathan Matias spend a few days in front of a whiteboard setting out what the documentary format should look like. Carl is an engineer who does research on computer vision, and Nathan has worked for quite a few years on interactive media and documentary.

For inspiration, we were looking at sites like the Australian Broadcasting Company’s Sounds like Techno, and Commanding Heights. Visually stunning and well-organised, they do a great job at bringing the best of radio and film into interactive media. But they don’t do so well at sharing information. Post-Web2.0, good, interoperable tools are much easier to find.

So while the working demo we built is completely functional and follows the general approach of old-school interactive documentary, we’re planning to make the project interoperable from the start. More on technology details soon.

Click to view the World University Documentary format demo.