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USP
The University of São
Paulo was founded in 1934 in a historical period marked by
important social, political and cultural transformations, by
the State Decree n. 6.283 of January 25, 1934, by decision of
the Governor of São Paulo, Armando de Salles Oliveira. Its
intellectual mentor was Júlio Mesquita Filho, editor-in-chief
of the O Estado de S. Paulo newspaper, who published numerous
articles and studies favorable to the founding of a university
in São Paulo and promoted discussions on the problems of
higher education in Brazil.
The University of São
Paulo (commonly referred to as USP) is the largest institution
of higher education and research in Brazil, and the third in
size in Latin America. It is also classified among the largest
one hundred of the approximately six thousand such
organizations in existence in the world today. USP is
influential in the area of higher education in the
South-American continent, having educated countless professors
with masters' and doctors' degrees now teaching at private
colleges and universities in Brazil. With its numerous
accomplishments throughout the years, USP continues to evolve
in the areas of education, science, technology, and the arts.
USP was founded with
the purpose of fostering research, advancing science, and
transmitting the knowledge that enlivens and develops the
human spirit and promotes human life. The university aims at
the preparation of specialists in all fields of culture and in
all scientific and artistic professions, its motto being:
"You shall conquer through knowledge." Its
objectives include providing the students with a dynamic
education which will enable them to keep pace with the
transformations in knowledge and maintain permanent dialogue
with society in a productive integration that joins education,
research and university extension.
USP opened its doors with several schools already
in operation, the oldest of which being the School of Law,
founded in 1827. The Faculty of Philosophy, Sciences
and Literature and Languages, was founded
concurrently with the university, with the mission of
integrating the literary, humanistic and scientific teaching
of the new university. It was later subdivided into autonomous
units. Many foreign professors, especially from France, Italy
and Germany, came to teach at the new institution.
USP's teaching units are distributed among its
six campuses: one in the City of São Paulo and five in the
interior of the state, in the cities of Bauru,
Piracicaba,
Pirassununga,
Ribeirão Preto
and São Carlos.
The university's administrative infrastructure and 23 of its
35 teaching units are located on the campus in São Paulo,
which bears the name of Armando de Salles Oliveira University
City. Four other large schools are located off the campus and
there are scientific bases and museums in a number of other
locations, including Anhembi, Anhumas, Araraquara, Cananéia,
Itatinga, Itirapina, Piraju, Salesópolis, São Sebastião,
Ubatuba and Valinhos, in the State of São Paulo, and Marabá,
in the state of Pará.
The
university offers undergraduate courses in all areas of
knowledge, and ten of its 23 national graduate programs were
given the maximum grade attributed by the Higher Education
Coordinating Office (Capes) of the Federal Ministry of
Education.
Data
published in the university's 1999 Statistical Yearbook
show that 617 courses are taught in its
teaching and research units, 130 of which are undergraduate
courses attended by approximately 40,000 students, and 487 are
graduate courses (including 257 for masters' and 230 for
doctors' degrees). USP confers an average of 4,600 bachelor or
equivalent diplomas each year. In terms of personnel, the
university community is comprised of 4,705 teachers and 14,659
other employees.
To
provide support to its research activities, USP has units that
are dedicated to elementary and secondary education, including
the Application School associated with the School of
Education, and the Technical-professional Dramatic Arts
School, of the School of Communications and Arts.
Through
its extension activities, such as the Neighbor Project (Projeto
Avizinhar), the Community Cooperatives, and the Open University Project for
Senior Citizens, USP plays a major role in
the growth of the communities near its campus. In addition,
its 24 museums and the Practical Science Museum (Estação Ciência)
jointly receive one million visitors per year, including
excursions made by approximately two thousand schools. The
university hospitals in São Paulo and other cities in the
state serve over one million persons. Besides these services,
the university has a Sports Center, called (Cepeusp),
jogging tracks, and excellent psychotherapeutic, genetic and
dental services, as well as a clinical analysis service. It
also has a university hospital (Hospital Universitário),
a veterinary hospital, and partnerships with the General
Hospital of the Medical School (Hospital das Clínicas)
and with the São Paulo Institute of Social Medicine and
Criminology.
With
the purpose of maintaining positive communication with its
internal community and with the public in general, all of the
university's official media are subordinated to the (CCS).
These media include the University Radio Station (Radio USP),
the University Television Channel (TV USP),
the USP Press Agency,
the USP Magazine,
the USP Newspaper,
the USP Web Portal
and the Espaço Aberto magazine.
To support its central
activities, USP has a complex administrative infrastructure
which includes the Campuses Administration Offices, the
President's Office, the Provost Offices, the University
Council, and the Central and Service Organs. The university
community also has available such services as bank agencies,
post offices, bookstores, luncheonettes, gas stations and bus
transportation.
City of Knowledge
The Mission of the City of Knowledge at the
University of São Paulo is to promote research, development
and applications that foster public, community or cooperative
use of new digital information and communication technologies
in Brazil. It was designed and created in 2001 by the
economist, sociologist and journalist Gilson Schwartz, whose
ICT-based project was selected in a contest organized by the
Institute of Advanced Studies.
While
important research has been done at different laboratories of
the largest Brazilian public university (at the faculties of
Education, Computer Science, Engineering, Economics,
Management, Communications and Social Sciences) in recent
years, many pioneering in High Performance Computing and
broadband webcasting, virtual reality and so forth, there was
never an integrated approach, both epistemologically and
institutionally, to distance education and the role of the
university in face of the new information and communication
technologies.
It would be certainly counterproductive as well
as politically doubtful to impose on such a rich variety of
research programs and disciplinary perspectives an
all-encompassing, centralized agenda for the development of
information and communication technologies, especially in
distance education. However, at some level the knowledge and
technologies developed by the advanced areas of the university
must converge in order to have a tangible and lasting effect
both internally and on society at large.
The City
of Knowledge captured the academic community’s will to
converge into socially relevant projects, thus giving rise to
an unprecedented network of professors, research fellows,
laboratories and institutions that actually go beyond the
frontiers of USP, reaching the Technological Research
Institute of the State of São Paulo (IPT-SP) as well as other
public and private universities in Brazil and globally.
CECAE, the University’s coordinating agency
for extension programs and technology transfer projects,
joined by CCS (coordinating agency for social communication)
and CCE (Electronic Computing Coordination), are among the
pivotal organizations that guarantee logistic, operational as
well as financial sustainability to the City of Knowledge.
As a clear sign of its multi-institutional scale
and interdisciplinary scope, the City is hosted academically
at the Institute of Advanced Studies of the University of São
Paulo, the high-profile pinnacle of academic excellence and
critical thinking which is directly linked to the Rector’s
Cabinet.
Organized as a permanent learning network of
projects combining continuous learning, applied research and
extension activities, the City of Knowledge also functions as
a lab aimed at pedagogic innovation at the University of São
Paulo.
Additionally, the City ranks today an
outstanding position in organizing the content events related
to information society representative organizations in Brazil,
especially those by the Brazilian Society of Informatics Users
(SUCESU), such as:
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COMDEX FAIR, the City organizes the content of
the youth-oriented “GENERATION COMDEX”;
-
e-learning/e-training, member of the Executive
Committee and co-organizer;
-
National Conference on Public and Community
Informatics (CONIP), member of the Advisory and Managing
Committee, responsible for the National Prize awarded to
excellency and citizenship in the use of information and
communication technologies (this year’s CONIP is sponsored
by the Government of Canada).
Other socially relevant partnerships have been
established such as with the International Telework
Organization (via the Regional Management Council of the State
of São Paulo), and câmara-e (the Brazilian Chamber of
Electronic Commerce). Participation in these forums takes
place based on mobilization of intellectual capital at USP and
in other institutions like PUC-SP, Federal University of Bahia
and USP-São Carlos, strengthening the academic network of
researchers aimed at multiple interdisciplinary approaches
which make up the field of the information society and that of
knowledge economy.
Among the City’s most noteworthy academic
associations is our partnership with Professor Pierre Lévy,
Canada Chair on Collective Intelligence. His presence in our
International Advisory Board will be a sure opportunity to
share knowledge and contribute to a creative understanding of
the uses and cultures associated to the implementation of ICTs
and distance education in particular.
The City of Knowledge is deeply committed in its
academic perspective to a humanistic perspective on the
creation of knowledge and technologies. As a Brazilian
educational institution, we are very much influenced by the
teachings of Paulo Freire and amused to see how fruitful his
insights can be on the implementation of knowledge creation
projects.
Moreover, as our infrastructure is part of the
country’s communication structure, we have set up
permanently open dialogue channels with some of the largest
media groups in Brazil, such as O Estado de S. Paulo (after
all, an institution that helped bring USP to light), Folha de
S. Paulo, Gazeta Mercantil, Jornal Valor (Globo and Folha) and
Abril (Revista Exame), with whom research agendas and
conference rooms have been shared in the start up of the City
of Knowledge.
Our
perspective points towards authentic interaction and
context-related learning, open to as many forms of knowledge
as the human mind can concoct. Distance education and
knowledge management techniques must be integrated in
solutions and practices, so that the individual who is a
subject of knowledge reception may continuously be invited to
become a “subject of knowledge creation”, that is,
innovation and improvement in his life. This is how we see
permanent learning networks. From a strictly economic
perspective, it is a growth engine pumped by the accumulation
of intellectual capital.
Our insertion in the community of the Americas
is strengthened by an important collaboration with the Media
Lab at the MIT, anchored in the ThinkCycle project (under the
Digital Nations Program). Actually, a paper describing the
“theoretical foundations” of the City of Knowledge was
presented at ThinkCycle’s first workshop and is available at
http://www.thinkcycle.org/tc-filesystem/?folder_id=13025.
The City was also present at the Bangalore workshops and
conference in December, 2002, actually benefiting from intense
networking under the auspices of Media Lab Asia.
Finally, two institutional associations are
important in the context of inter-american networks. We have
produced a socio-economic agenda for the information society
under demand by the United Nations Economic Committee for
Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC-UN) and Brazil’s
Ministry of Planning’s Institute of Applied Economic
Research (IPEA).
Last, but not least, the City of Knowledge hosts
the UNESCO Chair on Women, Science and Technology in Latin
America. This cooperation has already led to the creation of a
presential course with virtual communities for elementary and
intermediate teachers, mostly of public schools in the State
of São Paulo. Our main project with the UNESCO Chair is the
creation of the “Scientist Girls Network”.
In short,
the City of Knowledge offers a unique opportunity and
infrastructure to integrate projects which stimulate the
convergence of educational networks, based on bottom-up,
periphery-to-center design principles and relying on very
strong academic and institutional connections in strategic ICT
areas where knowledge and technology come across, locally and
globally.
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