The Mother-Child Health International Research Network have recently released a video documentary about a project of their's which helps pre-term infants in Columbia to significantly increase their chances of survival. Take a look!

WAYS has long been offering tools for social interaction between young scientists - every registered user can blog, announce science events like conferences, or comment on what others have written. Now we have started a collaboration with the German science news channel Wisskomm, which will bring you science news in video format on a weekly basis. For the moment, the service is in German only, but an English version is being planned. To get an idea on how this will look like, take a look below:

Winners will be presented at the International "Water and Film" Events in Istanbul (18 to 21 March 2009, cf.
announcement).

Submission deadline: Aug 15, 2008. Details at
http://www.expozaragoza2008.es/WaterTribune/Watercinema/seccion=... .

[seen at
http://www.openstudents.org/2008/04/30/sparc-announces-video-con... ]

Videos on any topic related to information sharing will be accepted, as long as they are made freely available on the web. Deadline: November 30, 2008.

More info via www.sparkyawards.org .

seen on Central-Eurasia-L:

Taalim-Forum Public Foundation is organizing Training for Trainers

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The role of expert knowledge is central to a video documentary on Wikipedia's way of knowledge sharing. It features the opinions of the co-founders of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, as well as of some other major Web 2.0 players and critics, including the authors Tim O’Reilly and Andrew Keen as well as Charles Leadbeater (a former advisor to Tony Blair), Bob McHenry (former editor of the Encyclopedia Britannica) and Ndesanjo Macha, one of the first to blog in an African language and one of the major contributors to the Swahili Wikipedia (which, by the way, is about to reach the 7,000 article milestone within the next few days).

The views of these people, particularly on truth and its representation in encyclopedias, contrast quite significantly but their aggregation provides food for thought on how the future of knowledge sharing might look like. The explicitly scientific perspective was mainly missing but between the lines, it became clear that large interactively collaborative (ubuntu) projects like this might also play an increasingly important role in academic research and tertiary education.

One possible direction is a continuation and expansion of Wikipedia until saturation, other options include branching and the development of more academically inclined variants like Scholarpedia, the Encyclopedias of Earth and Cosmos as well as Citizendium (not mentioned in the documentary but in a previous post here), and there are certainly many other possible developments.

Ever wondered what films can contribute to an era of global thinking and local action? Here comes an ambitious but well-structured initiative in this direction:

May 10, 2008 has been renamed into Pangea Day, as "sites in Cairo, Dharamsala, Kigali, London, New York City, Ramallah, Rio de Janeiro, and Tel Aviv will be videoconferenced live to produce a 4-hour program of powerful films, visionary speakers, and uplifting music."
In doing so, "Pangea Day taps the power of film to strengthen tolerance and compassion while uniting millions of people to build a better future."

Details via
http://www.pangeaday.org/ .