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Blogs of Seminar Speakers

Dear friends,

We made a selection of some blogs of the speakers who have participated during the last editions in the International Seminars of the UNESCO Chair.

• Stephen Downes: www.downes.ca

• Brian Lamb: blogs.ubc.ca/brian

• George Siemens: www.elearnspace.org/blog/

• David Wiley: opencontent.org/blog/

• Laura Czerniewicz: cloudworks.ac.uk/user/view/1125

• Teemu Leinonen: flosse.blogging.fi/

• Tim Unwin: unwin.wordpress.com/

• Sugata Mitra: sugatam.blogspot.com

• Larry Johnson: www.nmc.org/blog/ljohnson

• Tony Carr: www.tonicarr.com/blog/

This post is in: Education & e-Learning, Open educational Resources (OER), Resources, open social learning, uocunescoseminar2009.

03 02 2010

asalat

http://elearningtech.blogspot.com/2009/11/elearning-conferences-2010.html

Selection of Conferences 2010

Dear all,

We made a selection of events that will take place during this 2010. The events selected are mainly focussed on Education and ICTs, OER and ICTs and developing countries. We hope they will be of your interest.

ICTs and Development: An International Workshop for Theory, Practice, & Policy

March 11-12. New Delhi (India)

Web-based Education 2010

March 15-17. Sharm El Sheikh (Egypt)

ICTS for Africa

March 25-28. Yaoundé (Cameroon)

Web Information Systems and Technologies.Webist

April 7-10. Valencia (Spain)

WWW2010

April 26-30. Raleigh, NC. (USA)

e-Learning Africa

May 26-28. Lusaka (Zambia)

The International Consortium for Educational Development

June 28-30. Barcelona (Spain)

International Conference on Open Repositories

July 6-9. Madrid (Spain)

International Conference on Computing and ICT Research (ICCIR)

August 1-4. Kampala (Uganda)

Association for Learning Technology (ALT) Conference

September 7-9. Nottingham (UK)

TARC International Conference on Learning & Teaching

October 18-19. Petaling Jaya (Malaysia)

OpenEd: OER Impact and Sustainability

November 2-4. Barcelona (Spain)

International Conference on Web-based Learning

December 8-10. Shanghai (China)

ICTD2010 Conference

December 13-16. London (UK)

For further information about other conferences go to:

Yaoundé (Cameroon)

This post is in: Conferences 2010, Education & e-Learning, Meetings. Tags: 2010, Conferences, Education, ICTs, Seminars

25 01 2010

asalat

ICTs for Women Empowerment

The UNESCO Chair in e-Learning held a roundtable on December 10, with Juliet Webster and Cecilia Castaño under the title ICTs for Women Empowerment.
Juliet Webster is researcher and consultant on women’s working lives in the Information Society, specifically in the implications of changes in technologies and organisations.
Cecilia Castaño has been visiting researcher at Harvard University at the Center for European Studies in 2007 and is currently Manager of the Research Program of Gender and ICTs at the UOC since 2006.

During the roundtable Juliet and Cecilia referred to the different worldwide initiatives on this issue and emphasized the important position of women in the developing countries, since is where they can usually play a key role in spreading knowledge within their communities. As some experts in education quote: teach one woman and you teach a whole community.
The empowerment of women in ICTs is a way to reach a whole community and provide knowledge to it through training a reduce group of women. Instead of trying to reach end-users which in most cases can be a huge effort, teach women in the use of ICTs, can be more efficient to achieve the goal leading to the improvement of the education in a community.

Juliet Webster is author of Shaping Women’s Work: Gender, Employment and Information Technology (1996), and the co-editor of The Information Society in Europe: Work and Life in an Age of Globalization (2000).
Cecilia Castaño is author of Las mujeres y las tecnologías de la información. Internet y la trama de nuestra vida (Alianza, 2005)

This post is in: Gender, ICT4D, Meetings, open social learning. Tags: developing countries, empowerment, Gender, ICTs, women

21 01 2010

asalat

Photos of the VI International Seminar

VI International Seminar on Open Social Learning (IX): Closing

VI International Seminar of the UOC UNESCO Chair in e-Learning

Notes from the Open Social Learning, organized by UOC UNESCO Chair in E-Learning and held in Barcelona, Spain, on November 30^th and December 1^st 2009.

During two days we have been discussing the real possibilities of using social networks for teaching and learning. Experts from different countries have shown several satisfactory experiences related to social learning. The main conclusion of the seminar is that open social learning is a promising approach which still needs to be massively and courageously adopted by teachers and educational institutions, in order to cope with the demands of a evolving learning community which is demolishing the barriers between formal, non-formal and informal learning. More pilot experiences are needed and the whole learning process must be rethought, including the organization of educational resources, assessment and evaluation activities, reflection and the underlying technologies.

On the other hand, we used Twitter as a seminar live back-channel, allowing everybody to react and comment on the presentations of the keynote speakers. All the generated tweets (over 700) are available here. Now it’s time to further analyze the whole discourse and detect the main issues raised by all the users participating through Twitter.

Finally, we would like to encourage the audience to provide us feedback about the seminar and start a valuable discussion. We would like to know from you:

Do you believe Open Social Learning will eventually take off in educational practice?

Which topics do you think should be covered in the future editions of the seminar?

This post is in: open social learning, uocunescoseminar2009.

11 12 2009

VI International Seminar on Open Social Learning (VIII): UOC Session

VI International Seminar of the UOC UNESCO Chair in e-Learning

Notes from the Open Social Learning, organized by UOC UNESCO Chair in E-Learning and held in Barcelona, Spain, on November 30^th and December 1^st 2009.

In search for pedagogical value of OSL: UOC experiment in progress. Gemma Aguado, eLearn Center and Carles Fernández, Learning Technologies

The experience aims to test an open learning model, understood as a virtual learning environment open to the Internet community, based on the use of open resources and on a methodology focused on the participation and collaboration of users in the construction of knowledge.

The subject of the course ‘Journeys 2.0′ lasted 5 weeks, was launched through Facebook and used a specifically designed open methodology. This methodology of the course is based on the creation of a learning community able to self-manage their learning process. For that a facilitator was needed and also a central activity was established for people to participate and contribute in the community.

The opinions of the users participating in this course show some interesting questions related with the openness:

The structure of the activity is still quite ‘facilitator-centered´
Five weeks is not enough time
Lack of commitment with free courses
Facebook and its rigid architecture
The trend to return to traditional ways to learn

The authors also pointed out some difficulties such as the fact that these experiences may need more than two months to start working efficiently, the limitations of Facebook as learning platform or the lack of commitment of many users.

The audience of the seminar debated issues like the strategies to engage teachers in the experience, the fact to carry out a deep reflection of the learning methodology taking pedagogical issues and not technology as starting point and the possibilities to propose courses with subjects probably less ‘engaging’ as statistics. FaceUOC slide

Report on Open Social Learning in Spain. Iolanda García, Director of Innovation at the eLearn Center

The purpose of this presentation has been to summarize the main points of a reflection document about the situation and the future of OSL in Spain, which title is: Open Social Learning and its potential to transform higher education contexts in Spain

The paper collects the contributions and discussions of 14 experts, academics and professionals from different Spanish educational institutions (to see the names of the participants, visit the link of the Working Session on OSL). The presenter clarified that it cannot be taken as an exhaustive report about the reality of OSL in Spain, but that is an open text that wants to stimulate debate and reflection a an exhaustive report about the reality of OSL in Spain.

The paper analyses the kind of experiences and projects that can be recognized in Spain around this field. It presents the main lines of work that can be identified and also some specific experiences as a set of examples. All those experiences, despite being so different apparently, have many common features like, for instance, the lack of standards, an open architecture and a decentralized structure, people active involvement, participation and collaboration; the intensive use of technology as a means for the empowerment of the community; the fact of being rooted in real local needs and based on the opportunities provided by the same context, etc.

Concerning the role of technology in OSL, the document reflects on the main trends and challenges around the technological dimension of OSL and its influence on the general e-learning landscape. In this sense, it describes the main characteristics of OSL technologies; it discusses the crisis of LMS as dominant e-learning platforms, the weak points of the social media use in formal education settings, like problems related with tracing and assessing the learning activity, etc.

The last section of the paper deals with the perspectives of OSL in the Spanish higher education system, focusing on the limitations or obstacles on the one hand, and on the opportunities and the benefits that OSL could bring to our universities, on the other. Among the limitations, for instance, it is stressed the fact that the use of Internet in teaching and learning processes is not yet generalized in most of the Spanish universities. Another important limitation is the general lack of reflection about the pedagogical models behind the use and the design of technology and the use of mechanisms of control of the online activity, which is something alien to OSL.

Problems to follow and to assess student’s distributed learning activity are also treated.

Some of the mentioned opportunities are: personalization of the learning process; the construction of students and teachers digital identities to increase their social reputation and projection; possibilities for building learning communities and communities of practice based on expertise; the collective validation of content; opportunities for designing a new assessment approach more holistic and transversal, etc.

The presentation has finished with a concluding idea: the higher education system shouldn’t perceive the influence of OSL as a threat, but as an opportunity to evolve in order to fit the requirements and the needs of the knowledge society.

Q&A

How is the UOC going to support and driven this change of the university towards the OSL model?

The line of work of the eLearn Center is engaging teachers in projects of innovation in order to activate this change that can be later generalised to other parts in the university. Of course there are many Departments and people involved that must to work together in order to make this change possible.

It is not only the university that has to manage this change, but the way the students approach their own way of learning. On the other hand, the Vice-presidency of Innovation has designed some axis for the evolution of the educational model of the UOC and is working together with other Vice-presidencies in order to support the development of this model.

Have you thought (in the paper) about ways to create channels between studies in different universities to make possible students distributed learning?

No we didn’t, since the paper only analyses the picture of the situation but it doesn’t propose ways to overcome limitations/problems. This would be the next step.

This post is in: Education & e-Learning, Education and culture, Information Society, Open Access, Open educational Resources (OER), Technological Innovation and Culture, University, open social learning, uocunescoseminar2009. Tags: eLearn Center, Facebook, Higher education, OSL, Paper, Spain

02 12 2009

VI International Seminar on Open Social Learning (VII): Meta-Learning: Process of Learning in the Network Era

VI International Seminar of the UOC UNESCO Chair in e-Learning

Meta-Learning: Process of Learning in the Network Era. Jay Cross, independent consultant, founder and CEO of the Internet Time Group LLC, Berkeley, USA

Notes from the Open Social Learning, organized by UOC UNESCO Chair in E-Learning and held in Barcelona, Spain, on November 30^th and December 1^st 2009.

Value has migrated to intangibles. Companies about ideas, people predominate over products in the stock markets.

Learning can be analyzed under different perspectives: sociology, pedagogy, technology used, etc. 80% of learning in corporations is informal, is observing what other people do. Retained learning is insignificant. But in order to change behavior in corporations, learning should advance in such percentages.

The business ecosystem is very complex; employees are in the middle of a cloud of elements. Employees are like learners in a lifelong learning cycle, from pre-hires, novices, etc. to olders and alumni. Now learning and work are becoming undistinguishable one from each other, and our employees are not keeping up with the fast changes in corporations.

We are in a team work age, people work in teams, learning is not learner centered, is group centered.

Q&A

Instead about talking to trainers in corporate learning, why don’t talk to employees? They should be learning further than just doing their work.

Good organizations offer employees opportunities in order to develop their skills and careers. It’s good for the people but it’s also good for organizations.

The whole thing about teams is not new, what are you trying to introduce here?

VLEs and other tools still think of individual learners, not groups. And groups are variable, we need to support learning in teams, but not the way “wisdom of teams” does.

What about managers, do they get the idea?

Every CEO says “people are the most important” but? They neglect social learning, they rely on complex solutions rather on simpler but more effective ones, like using a Wiki for internal knowledge management system, for example, thus reducing time looking for staff. Participative systems can improve the way companies manage knowledge they generate inside.

This post is in: Information Society, Participation, Engagement, Use, Activism, Technological Innovation and Non-formal Education, open social learning, uocunescoseminar2009. Tags: Berkeley, Jay Cross

02 12 2009

VI International Seminar on Open Social Learning (VI): e/merge: Peer learning online from developing contexts

VI International Seminar of the UOC UNESCO Chair in e-Learning

e/merge: Peer Learning Online from Developing Context. Laura Czerniewicz and Tony Carr, Director and Senior Lecturer, respectively, of the Center for Educational Technology at the University of Cape Town, South Africa.

Notes from the Open Social Learning, organized by UOC UNESCO Chair in E-Learning and held in Barcelona, Spain, on November 30^th and December 1^st 2009.

Conferences are changing, in several dimensions: time, space and scope. In this sense, openness means space, transparent, boundless, etc. We think of open as the opposite of closed, good vs bad, in a binary decision. But there are different kinds of openness, related to social, learning and technological issues. We need to use a continuum for openness, along criteria and categories and in relation to needs and aims.

e/merge is a conference which purpose is to grow and consolidate the community of learning technology professionals and researchers in developing countries, specially Africa.

Regarding the social issues, we have found power relations “flattened”, people from different levels engaging in conversations. But 30% of participants generate 70% of the activity. Passive participation is not considered negative “lurking”, although participation is encouraged. There is a strong sense of online presence, multiple communication channels, presence indicators and informal conference spaces. There is some risk, also, as some participants may feel uncomfortable with such an open setting.

Q&A

Why don’t you open it to anybody?

We do not want the conference flattered by hundreds of people from Western institutions; we would like to promote participants from Africa. We want it open enough but not open completely.

How do we keep alive this kind of meetings? What about using new technologies?

e/merge is a two week special event every two years, but we don’t have an ongoing community based on technology. In fact, we could go for it or it could kill us.

You said “open and safe”. What do you mean by “safe”?

We mean it as trust; in order people take risks in a safe way, exposing you to other people. So it’s safety for risk taking. Bloggers are a good example of that. It’s especially new in the African context, so we need to adapt it. A culture of open conversation, acceptance has grown in e/merge conferences. You don’t get negative feedback, but other kinds of responses. It’s a nurturing space, but with positive criticism.

Asynchronous conversations predominate the conversation itself, especially on bad conditions, electricity problems, etc. Do you expect to empower the synchronous part of e/merge?

It has been increasing from one conference to the next. But people use both synchronous and asynchronous tools in a similar way, especially when the conversation is “buzzing”.

What about the “merge” part of e/merge?

Every conference of e/merge includes speakers from other countries, so it’s a combination of global and local participants. Of course we expect to see the number of participants from Africa increase in a near future.

This post is in: Education & e-Learning, open social learning, uocunescoseminar2009. Tags: developing context, Laura Czerniewicz, Tony Carr

02 12 2009

VI International Seminar on Open Social Learning (IV): Demostration Session

VI International Seminar of the UNESCO Chair in e-Learning

Notes from demostration session the VI UOC UNESCO Chair International Seminar on Open Social Learning, Barcelona, 30 November – 1 December, 2009

George Siemens and Kathleen Matheos: Open Social Learning in Higher Education: an African context. University of Manitoba, Canada.

The project is the result of collaboration among the Research and Education Networking Unit, the Extended Education University of Manitoba and the Open Society Institute in West Africa. The purpose of the project is to build human resource capacity in African universities in the use of social networking technologies to transform teaching and learning, and create the environment for the democratic exchange of knowledge between learners within Africa and beyond.

Process: two day face-to-face workshop in conjunction with e-learn Dakar; 12 week bilingual online course open teaching; website references and resources; re-design of learning activity; sustainability of website and network.

The guiding theory is based on social connected pedagogy, learner autonomy (self-efficacy), learner directed (we provide, they choose; be careful of not importing western “standards”) and contextualization of content.

The project uses Wikiversity. Learners are encouraged to participate in forums and discussions of their interest and to initiate new learning opportunities. There is also a Moodle site.

The participant profiles showed interesting facts. There was more participation from non-African learners. There were concerns about the mix of conversations that were held. Participation was limited in some cases (LPP…Lurking). There is a group of people who know and there is a group of people who don’t know. It is necessary the latter participate in order to learn from the former.

Several issues aroused: technical (bandwidth, but also electricity), cultural and others about design and pedagogy (some students were uncomfortable posting on a Wiki).

The question for us is how social, economic, political and cultural contexts do impact self-efficacy?

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Tony Carr: Facilitating online: a course leader’s guide. University of Cape Town, South Africa.

Why an online facilitation course? Increasing use of online resources and interaction at universities; educators likely to confront significant learning curve; online conversational spaces encourage debate and shared knowledge construction; existing courses not easily available to African institutions.

Pilot course: 5 week course for e/merge 2008 conference costs, with emphasis on clarity. It’s an open educational resource (so it can be downloaded and customized for local contexts), in English, suitable for fully online courses, blended, online conferences or collaboration projects. It includes synchronous and asynchronous learning activities.

The aims to develop are: knowledge, skills and attitudes concerning online facilitation; awareness of other toolsets available; skills in designing appropriate online activities. It adopts and active and experiential approach. Its principles are fostering online learning, playful learning and reflective learning.

Multilevel learning path: arriving (the most difficult one), conversing with other people (trade off between dominating and lurking), facilitating (adopting more active roles), creating and applying the acquired learning. By the end of the course, participants should be able to facilitate online discussions, demonstrate knowledge of different facilitation strategies, including web 2.0 tools, and designing or adapting small learning activities.

It is very useful to know who uses the course (which is licensed as CC-BY-NC-SA), any feedback is really appreciated: we have found mentions on influential blogs, positive comments, initial take up in South Africa, interest within UN agencies and some possibilities for use in UK and USA as well.

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Carlos Santos and Luis Pedro: SAPO Campus Project. University of Aveiro, Portugal.

The main objectives gravitate around the following issues: web 2.0 promoted by the institution, openness, PLE institutionally supported, dissemination and massification, and to promote blended formal and informal activities. We had to “fight” against the institutional environment: control and supervision practices, hierarchies, students’ expectations, resistance to change and natural inertia.

The web2.0 phenomenon: students filling forms to create a blog within the institution. On the other hand, the out world is simple, free and fast, based on the DIY philosophy, you can get the last technical innovations but… you cannot rely only on external services (i.e. magnolia meltdown).

Institutional front-ends should be super-aggregators / mash ups of available services from different communities. The institution may provide learners with some basic services but it should offer also the opportunity of replacing/complementing them with external ones. People from inside and outside the institution can participate and consume through these services, but only people from the institution can create services.

Connecting ideas and services is based on a presence builder, a PLE, e-portfolio and instant messaging. A multilayer architecture has been designed to support the whole system. Core services should be truly open, in order to promote participation. The use of Creative Commons for content publishing is also encouraged. The result should be a PMLE: personal meaningful learning environment. Lifelong learning is also an important issue, as well as building an effective digital identity.

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Tom Caswell and Marion Jensen: TwHistory: Historical Reenactments with Tweeter. Utah State University, USA.

Social networking is everywhere. Twitter is a tool that has changed completely the way we do some things. Hastags are the best example of that: now you can follow a stream of tweets related to an event, conference or so. You can create (and recreate) a complete history of facts following a temporal line.

Two examples: the Battle of Gettysburg and the Cuban missile crisis. You can have followers / spectators, as well as participants / content creators. The basic idea is to reproduce the context and timeline, either because there is a complete documentation or by introducing some variations. So you can experience history in bite-sized micro-updates and spread out authentically to match the timeline. As participants, you can create content to represent a historical persona, learn from analyzing original sources, which is participatory and collaborative in nature.

Future plans include reenacting the pioneer trek or the Lewins and Clark expedition. We are currently seeking funding for sustainability, a web-based repository for historical simulations so anyone can create, post and share their own, and allow the replay of simulations with varied timelines and start times.

This post is in: open social learning, uocunescoseminar2009. Tags: Carlos Santos, George Siemens, Kathleen Matheos, Luís Pedro, Marion Jensen, open social learning, Tom Caswell, Tony Carr

01 12 2009

VI International Seminar on Open Social Learning (V): The Role of Open Educational Resources in Personal Learning

VI International Seminar of the UOC UNESCO Chair in e-Learning

The Role of Open Educational Resources in Personal Learning. Stephen Downes. Senior Resercher for the National Research Council of Canada.

Notes from the Open Social Learning, organized by UOC UNESCO Chair in E-Learning and held in Barcelona, Spain, on November 30^th and December 1^st 2009.

Open educational resources are the words that people use in a conversation that is personal learning. OER are produced by some people and used by others, but they are not giving them back, there is no feedback.

Personal learning can be thought in different ways. Learning is thought of from the perspective of the learner, not from the perspective of the institution, not from the perspective of the content to be taught. Personal learning is more about an individuals’ growth and development, expressed in terms of skills and capacities, but it’s more accurate (for various reasons) to think of it as being like literacy.

In this sense, personal learning environments are best thought as an ecology in which learning takes place, with the student in the center, but is in fact a mesh or a web of interconnected students. Connectivism, or collective knowledge supposes that knowledge is created and shared by an interconnecting community of learners, and it is distributed.

The learner participates and engages in a community. Participation is guided by personal interest and motivation, not staged, no hierarchy of interaction. Beginners jump into new things and try them. Then they need to discover what is wrong searching for additional resources. But the content is not the point; the content is the place where learning occurs. There is no linear structure, order, no beginning, no end, it’s a mesh.

But: why? What pedagogy purpose is served by open sharing? It lays on the nature of knowledge itself. The traditional view describes “science” (and knowledge) as a set of propositions, such as: learning is the remembering of the body of these facts and principles. But facts and principles are dynamic, not static; furthermore, in chaotic systems, facts and principles do not exist. On the other hand, the functional view of science describes it as a set of procedures or practices. It amounts to the teaching of methods or rules rather than facts. This creates the danger of emphasizing process rather than results.

So, science can be also described as conversation. A conversation with nature (experiments, tests, etc.), or a conversation among Scientifics (vocabularies, ontologies, etc.). Science is connecting, becomes essentially from forming connections. Scientists are literate in this kind of conversations, they recognize patterns, and they see what other scientists see.

Personal knowledge, shared by an interconnecting network of neurons (the less common way of representing knowledge), is also distributed, but ineffable, it cannot be expressed in words. But neural networks offer a possible metaphor; as they create associations, follow several rules and so.

Learning can be seen as a combination of the remembering of facts but also as creating connections between facts. By manipulating words in conversations we are in the middle of a learning process. But we must pay attention to the vocabularies we are using. Is it the same for publishers and students? We need to move from mention to use, we need to be speakers, as only as speakers we will be part of a conversation, that is, learning.

Therefore, we cannot produce knowledge for people. OER beneficiaries are, surprisingly and ironically, the people who produce the resources. So, why do we fund universities to produce such knowledge? The only sustainable OERs are those produced by the learners themselves.

Q&A

What is the value of sharing for learners? Once they have learned something, why sharing it?

You produce connections in your mind by doing, so sharing is a good way of establishing a conversation and, therefore, learning. And not only between two people, but many.

Don’t you need a map or something in order to start learning? What about if there are different things to learn?

There is not a “best way of learning”, it depends on the situation. Learning is not just picking rules and applying them to a problem. It’s “pattern recognition”, recognizing patterns of connectivity as a whole. Chess players at a master level apply rules but they “see” or perceive the match as a whole.

What about pragmatic teaching? …When you expect to observe results at the end of the teaching process…

We are mixing learning, evaluation and management there. If we are interested in checking that an individual is able to perform something, is that really evaluating the learning process? But the ultimate beneficiary of learning should be the learner, not the teacher / manager.

This post is in: Open educational Resources (OER), open social learning, uocunescoseminar2009. Tags: Open educational Resources (OER), open social learning

01 12 2009

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