Notes from the the Working Session on Open Social Learning, organized by UOC UNESCO Chair in E-Learning and held in Barcelona, Spain, on June 30th, 2009. More notes on this event: uocunescoosl.

Open Social Learning in Spain. Clarifying Concepts
Dolors Reig

Dolors Reig. Photo by Carlos Albaladejo

Traditional e-Learning: everything preset, all paths settled. The evolution has then been, from the web to the social web, and from the social web to the personal web (Nova Spivack).

New ideas that shape the social web:

• Intercreativity
• Collective intelligence
• Smart mobs
• Wisdom of the crowds
• Architecture of participation
• Sharism

Open Social Learning

• Digital natives: It’s problable, though, that the so-called digital natives they actually are “hanging out” online (danah boyd). Thus, the digital knowledge might not be that high within digital natives as we should expect.
• Connectivism: the Internet is so shaped to learning because it works as we do, we learn as networks, learning happens when connections are created, the ability to learn is more important than knowing, etc.
• Social learning: if markets are conversations (Cluetrain Manifesto), education and learning are also conversations, the prosumers and active students being the main characters of this era and peer-to-peer being the best way to acquire information and knowledge. From the “I think therefore I am” to the “we participate, therefore we are” (Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0).
• Informal Learning: Jay Cross states that 70-90% of corporate learning is informal. We have to enable this informal learning so that it can happen.
• e-Learning 2.0
• Generative Learning
• Communities of Learning
• Constructivism
• Edupunk

Creativity: We should be focusing in what motivates people (à la Maslow): that’s why social networking sites are so successful.

Autonomous learning: what really drives knowledge is the process, not the output.

Universal, free and democratic learning (Soumitra Dutta).

Minimally invasive education, taking the example of Sugata Mitra.

Lifelong learning, immersive learning, non-stop learning, ubiquitous learning.

An active role that is required to remix. At its turn, remixing asks for multiliteracies.

Metaverses: Augmented reality, lifelogging, etc.

Changes of roles: the student is not passive, but a participant. The teacher is a facilitator, a curator. And the information becomes a perpetual beta.

Technology becomes too a very important part of the equation: open APIs or all technologies that enable sindication (XML/RSS, Atom, etc.) are true drivers of this change.

Main conclusions

• A web simple to use
• People, collectives, interests, tags, twines, groups
• Real time web
• “If we know the exact cost, the exact agenda of a project, it is probable that it is based on an obsolete technology” (Joseph Gavin, Jr.)

In all this landscape, the e-Portfolio is very relevant, as it perfectly fits with and represents the digital persona. And, complementing to this, e-competences are the necessary tools to get on with digital life.

Q&A

Begoña Gros: We have to make an effort to link the newest technologies and applications with learning or education, and not separating them as if they belonged to different spheres. A: Agreed. Indeed, as we increasingly happen to know more and more uses of the Internet, people shift from “bad” practices (online gambling, porn, etc.) towards “good” practices (learning, communicating with peers, etc.).

Jesús Martínez: Teachers need to learn so that they keep being up-to-date and can keep on teaching. We should accelerate the process of change, of adaptation, or re-learning. A: One of the direst problems is not only that people don’t know, but that people (e.g. teachers) do not know that they do not know.

Related posts

• Working Session on Open Social Learning (II). Rubén Díaz: Diagnosis and Perspective (0)
• Working Session on Open Social Learning (I). Marc Alier: Open Social Learning? (0)
• Wikiversity – the Attempt to Create a Free University on the Internet (1)
• UOC UNESCO Chair in Elearning Fifth International Seminar (VIII). Reflections & Conclusions (1)
• UOC UNESCO Chair in Elearning Fifth International Seminar (VII). Round Table: the Fight against the Digital Divide in Spain (0)

Notes from the the Working Session on Open Social Learning, organized by UOC UNESCO Chair in E-Learning and held in Barcelona, Spain, on June 30th, 2009. More notes on this event: uocunescoosl.

Open Social Learning en España: Diagnosis and Perspective
Rubén Díaz

Rubén Díaz. Photo by Carlos Albaladejo

Expanded education: Search for new ways of education that embed and adapt social and communicational processes that the Internet made possible.

Education can take place at every moment, in every place. Inside and outside the walls of the academic institution.

We can virtually access all the information that the whole World generates (and has generated), but: Will we have the need for that much information? (Nam June Paik, 1977). And we need to take control over the technologies that make possible the access to all that information and apply them to, for instance, Education (Noam Chomsky, 1998). Education is not, is being (Paulo Freire). Nobody knows it all, everyone knows something, all the knowledge lays on the whole humankind (Pierre Lévy). Today, the voice you speak with could not be your own voice (DJ Spooky).

Margaret Meads (Culture and Compromise) stresses the fact of the non-linearity of knowledge and how we are stuck to the books. Jesús Martín Barbero states the importance of oral and visual culture nowadays (i.e. cyberculture) in opposition with the traditional written culture of education during the last centuries.

Knowledge is delocalized. Everyone’s interested in education, and everyone’s capable of learning.

Learning takes place when solving problems by going through them using creativity. But how and why are people creative? And how can the environment negatively affect the learning environment? Is the actual educational system a learning environment that fosters creativity?

The learning environment is the source of knowledge. Active and collaborative learning environments enable learning by doing. We need to disclose communication channels so that motivation happens. We need to develop a pedagogy of the question. We are used to a pedagogy of the answer, where the teacher answers questions that the students never put (Paulo Freire).

We have to move towards the educommunication, avoiding the education of silence. Oriented self-education, expanded education. Expanded education is the communicative link between memory and remix to build the self from the world we speak from.

An adult assimilates:

• 20% of information heard
• 30% of observed
• 50% of observed and listened
• 70% of expressed by oneself
• 90% of elaborated by oneself

Experience: Platoniq’s Bank of Common Knowledge in the 3000 viviendas de Sevilla.

Q&A

Enric Senabre: What about expanded assessment? A: The problem is not only assessment, but the whole system. And we should begin with youngsters and schools, and later on with the University.

Q: what about beyond formal education? A: At Zemos98 we schedule a yearly Festival, where different people can meet different kinds of knowledge.

Silvia Bravo: If all these approaches and technologies are so evidently good, why aren’t they more pervasive? Where are we failing? A: The blame is maybe on the moral majority of the mainstream, the socioeconomic system where education is business. A second aspect is contextualization: how to use technology to work locally.

Related posts

• Working Session on Open Social Learning (III). Dolors Reig: Open Social Learning in Spain. Clarifying Concepts (0)
• Working Session on Open Social Learning (I). Marc Alier: Open Social Learning? (0)
• Expanded education symposium: who is Brian Lamb? (0)
• Ronaldo Lemos: future challenges of education (0)
• Jesus Martín-Barbero: the educational city (0)

Notes from the the Working Session on Open Social Learning, organized by UOC UNESCO Chair in E-Learning and held in Barcelona, Spain, on June 30th, 2009. More notes on this event: uocunescoosl.

Open Social Learning?
Marc Alier

Open Learning: We use to define problems so that some structured learning outcomes happen, but problems do not usually have unique solutions, as life. If we open education, we have to be aware that problems and solutions have to be open too.

Social Learning: If we do not do nothing as a society, we do not learn as a group. The interesting thing is to participate and be engaged within the community. Social Learning is learning as a group. But it is also about learning how to be social, is about education training people to socialize and, at the same time, to define the society as is: education shapes society.

Learn in Community: Moodle as the flagship of community learning. Related with hacker ethics: passion for what you do; freedom; value and social recognition; information and knowledge accessibility; activism; social commitment.

Marc Alier. Photo by Enric Senabre Hidalgo

Open, social and hacker ethics lead us to Learning in community by doing and sharing openly.

When students are given control begin to feel confident on what they do. And things happen. People self-organize; new “solutions” or “answers” to pre-established problems/questions arise; and new knowledge emerges.

Some examples:

• Work on specific subjects but without constraints, being the output a collaborative text on a wiki + a presentation. Students take divergent directions from what one would expect, but with high quality output and high engagement.
• Collaborative (massive: circa 30 students) project management subject where the whole classroom defines a single project. Rules? Only traceability of work. Students would use all kind of web 2.0 applications to distribute roles and tasks, to schedule milestones, to distribute workload, etc. The teacher then becomes a mentor whose “sole” work is to monitor and guide the autonomous work of the students.

To be able to perform such a monitoring activity, the software needs to be prepared to do that monitoring. Tracing is a must and interoperability between applications another need so that different tools can be integrated and used during the learning (and teaching) process.

Q&A

Ismael Peña-López: what competences need teachers to become “open social learning monitors or mentors”? A: First step is accepting that the outcomes of open collaborative work is an open and unexpected outcome. And this is not a competence but an attitude. Once the teacher gives control away, they will bring in technology: the teacher does not need the technology to give it to the students, but to follow (and catch up with) them. The attitude is the key: what outcomes are you renouncing to in exchange of implication and satisfaction?

Dolors Reig: How to monitor? How to evaluate? How to make quantify performance? A: The important thing in technology is how you are going to evaluate, and then design the software. If the evaluation model is clear, technology should not be an issue… provided it is free software and you can edit its code and add new features.

Ismael Peña-López: Can we really always renounce to part of our syllabus, of our planned content? A: Are exams a real way to assess learning? Or are we teaching students to pass exams? If we want to transform the society we don’t need knowledge, we need abilities and competences. We need not to teach knowledge but to teach how to acquire new knowledge and to have a critical attitude towards the knowledge we reach.

Jesús Martínez: How do we cope with competition (in education and in society at large)? With inertias? A: The educational system is at stake, so inertias can be broken down in pieces if this is the general will or the general trend.

Related posts

• Working Session on Open Social Learning (III). Dolors Reig: Open Social Learning in Spain. Clarifying Concepts (0)
• Working Session on Open Social Learning (II). Rubén Díaz: Diagnosis and Perspective (0)
• Wikiversity – the Attempt to Create a Free University on the Internet (1)
• UOC UNESCO Chair in Elearning Fifth International Seminar (VIII). Reflections & Conclusions (1)
• UOC UNESCO Chair in Elearning Fifth International Seminar (VII). Round Table: the Fight against the Digital Divide in Spain (0)

We finally have the 10 minutes video that summarizes Tim Unwin’s talk at UOC UNESCO Chair in e-Learning Fifth International Seminar. One of the most “fighting the digital divide” talks, focused on the development of the underprivileged countries through the use of ICT’s, but keeping a very interesting sceptic point of view of some things. http://unescochair.blogs.uoc.edu/video/unwin.flv

You can embed the video on your web site using this code.

Related posts

• Tim Unwin’s ICT4D conference teaser (0)
• Susan Metros: Visual Literacy conference video (0)
• Susan Metros talks about visual literacy (teaser) (0)
• Sugata Mitra: Hole in the wall (13′ video) (2)
• Sugata Mitra’s ‘Hole in the wall’ conference video preview (0)

Last month we made a break in the publication of the videos recorded during our Fifth International Seminar, but we had another good video instead: Jack Dorsey talked with us about possible educational uses of the tool Twitter. Now we have some more material to show. It’s an honour to present you Tim Unwin’s ICT4D conference (which is just a short way to express a larger tittle: Partnerships and post-constructivism education in development practive).

Unwin, who holds an UNESCO Chair in ICT4D in the University of London, came deep on the mainlines of collaboration with underprivileged countries and how ICT’s can help development but always keeping a very strong sense of critics on the mistakes done, the problems found and how to improve it all.

On this teaser, that announces the incoming of the conference video for Monday 8th June, Unwin gives us a key sentence: “I’m a passionate addict of technology, but in the back of my mind I think we may be causing a huge damage”:http://unescochair.blogs.uoc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/teaserunwin.flv

You can embed the video on your web site using this code.

Related posts

• Tim Unwin video: ICT4D (1)
• Susan Metros: Visual Literacy conference video (0)
• Susan Metros talks about visual literacy (teaser) (0)
• Sugata Mitra: Hole in the wall (13′ video) (2)
• Sugata Mitra’s ‘Hole in the wall’ conference video preview (0)

Critic and writer Howard Rheingold has just coined a very interesting concept. The Twitter Literacy theory (”I refuse to make up a Twittery name for it”, says Rheingold) is motivated by the fact that Nielsen recently noted that 60% of new Twitter users fail to return on the following month. The author argues a series of issues that can help users to avoid the spam and find their own way to the real conversation:

• Openness – anyone can join, and anyone can follow anyone else
• Immediacy – You won’t get the sense of Twitter if you just check in once a week
• Variety – political or technical argument, gossip, scientific info, news flashes, poetry, social arrangements, classrooms, …
• Reciprocity – people give and ask freely for information they need
• A channel to multiple publics – I’m a communicator and have a following that I want to grow and feed. I can get the word out about a new book or vlog post in second…
• A way to meet new people – Connecting with people who share interests has been the most powerful social driver of the Internet since day one.
• Community-forming – Twitter is not a community, but it’s an ecology in which communities can emerge.
• A platform for mass collaboration – Twestival (online charity event) has raised over a quarter of a million dollars via Twitter, funding 55 clean water projects for 17,000 people in Ethiopia, Uganda, and India.
• Searchability – the ability to follow searches for phrases like “swine flu” or “Howard Rheingold” in real time provides a kind of ambient information radar on topics that interest me.

Please, read the whole Rheingold’s article at SFgate.com for a complete vision of the story.

Related posts

• What would you ask to Twitter founder Jack Dorsey? (11)
• Open interview with Jack Dorsey; is Twitter useful for education? (4)
• Howard Rheingold: On line social networks (1)
• Howard Rheingold: how to make a successful virtual community (3)
• Howard Rheingold’s ‘Virtual Learning Communities’ teaser (0)

The New Media Consortium (NMC) and the Educause Association recently reported the results of the Horizon Project, “a long-running qualitative research project that seeks to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning, research, or creative expression within learning-focused organizations”. The document (PDF, 368KB) analyses the context of new education and its relationship with technologies like mobiles, cloud computing, geo-localization, the semantic web applications or smart objects and describes key trends like:

• Increasing globalization continues to affect the way we work, collaborate, and communicate.
• The notion of collective intelligence is redefining how we think about ambiguity and imprecision
• Experience with and affinity for games as learning tools is an increasingly universal characteristic among those entering higher education and the workforce
• Visualization tools are making information more meaningful and insights more intuitive
• As more than one billion phones are produced each year, mobile phones are benefiting from unprecedented innovation, driven by global competition.

This issue of Horizon report, which is the sixth annual report in the series, also alerts about critical challenges like:

• There is a growing need for formal instruction in key new skills, including information literacy, visual literacy, and technological literacy
• Students are different, but a lot of educational material is not
• Significant shifts are taking place in the ways scholarship and research are conducted, and there is a need for innovation and leadership at all levels of the academy
• We are expected, especially in public education, to measure and prove through formal assessment that our students are learning
• Higher education is facing a growing expectation to make use of and to deliver services, content, and media to mobile devices

In addition, the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya has been collaborating with the New Media Consortium on the translation of the report onto Spanish (PDF, 401KB) and Catalan (PDF, 396KB) languages.

The New Media Consortium, an foundation world wide respected due to its expertise on education and innovation fields, include some names on its council that might be familiar tu us. I’m talking about Susan Metros, whose “Digital literacy in the age on the big picture” intervention at UOC UNESCO Chair in e-Learning Fifth International Seminar video summary we published on this blog some weeks ago.

What seems to be a bit worrying is that, after reading the report challenges and conclusions, the Spanish Government plan (addresses to an article written in Spanish) of stablishing partnerships with editorial, technology and telecommunication services companies (links to a blogpost written in Spanish) in order to digitalize its teaching materials doesn’t seem to fit very much with the main ideas of the Horizon plan.

Related posts

• Susan Metros: Visual Literacy conference video (0)
• Susan Metros talks about visual literacy (teaser) (0)
• Working Session on Open Social Learning (III). Dolors Reig: Open Social Learning in Spain. Clarifying Concepts (0)
• Working Session on Open Social Learning (II). Rubén Díaz: Diagnosis and Perspective (0)
• Working Session on Open Social Learning (I). Marc Alier: Open Social Learning? (0)

Note from the editor: This post is a summary of the paper originally published by Montse Guitart and Teresa Romeu at elearningeuropa.info (download PDF, 222kb). For further information about the authors, please click on the “read more” link at the end of the post.

A brief summary:

Universities have a key role in providing students with strategies and competences to allow them to form part of the current information society and, hence, to be able to have a productive career.

In the scenario in which the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (Open University of Catalonia, UOC) is making strategic decisions about the implementation of the new degrees within the framework of the EHEA, one UOC-specific competence is defined as follows: use and application of ICTs in academic and professional settings. This includes working with ICT competences already developed. This institutional option is based on the historical decision made by the University from the start to create a specific subject and the decision of the Catalan government to create a qualification in ICT skills. Data on levels of satisfaction and the results at the end of each semester have been positive.

On the basis of the UOC’s experience, we are in a position to single out the key transferable elements for designing a proposal for achieving digital literacy in any educational context: the definition of the ICT competence, the gradual acquisition of ICT skills through project-based work, teamwork in using and applying the new tools and the role of the tutors.

Relevant publications related to this article:

• GUITERT, M.; ROMEU, T.; PÉREZ-MATEO, M. (2007) Competencias TIC y trabajo en equipo en entornos virtuales. Revista de Universidad y Sociedad del Conocimiento, Vol. 4, No. 1, ISSN: 1658-580X.
• GUITERT, M.; ROMEU, T (2008) A digital literacy proposal in the UOC scenario. Proceedings of the European Distance and E-Learning Network (EDEN). Lisbon, Portugal, 11-14 June, p. 87, ISBN: 978-963-06-5132-5.
• GUITERT, M.; ROMEU, T. (2008) Digital literacy proposal from higher education: the UOC case. International Conference on Digital Literacy. Brunel University, UK, 17-18 November.
• GUITERT, M.; ROMEU, T. ; GUERRERO, A.; PADROS, A. (2008) ICT competences for net-generation students. Advanced Learning Technologies, 2008. ICALT ‘08. Eighth IEEE International Conference, Santander, Spain, 1-5 July, pp. 480-481, ISBN: 978-0-7695-3167-0.
• GUITERT, M.; GUERRERO, A. E.; ORNELLAS, A.; ROMEU, T.; ROMERO, M. (2008). Implementación de la competencia propia “Uso y aplicación de las TIC en el ámbito académico y profesional” en el contexto universitario de la UOC. Revista latinoamericana de Tecnología Educativa, No. 2, pp. 81- 89, ISSN: 1695-288X.
• GUITERT, M.; ROMEU, T. (2009) ICT competences for online university students. Proceedings of the IADIS International Conference e-Society, Barcelona, Spain, 25-28 February.
• ORNELLAS, A.; GUITERT, M.; ROMEU, T. (2009) Teaching strategies using social software for developing ICT competences in university students. 5th International Conferenceon Multimedia and ICT in Education, Lisbon, Portugal, 22-24 April.

Continue reading »

Related posts

• UOC opens up its teaching materials (0)
• UOC eLearn Center presentation (0)
• RUSC: Digital culture and creative practices in education (0)
• Networked knowledge: a new platform for the UOC’s online content (0)
• Network society: management and monitoring (0)

Elsa Corominas is Economist, Ph.D candidate in Sociology by the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and Editorial Secretary of RUSC.

A new issue of RUSC (the e-Journal promoted by the Univeristat Oberta de Catalunya and its UNESCO Chair in E-Learning) has been published this week.

This issue opens a new phase of the journal, with two important changes. First, its periodicity has been modified: from the next issue, RUSC will be published every July and January, and numbers will include a monographic section and 5 or 6 additional articles each one. Secondly, RUSC has been adapted to the Open Journal System. All these changes are expected to improve the quality of the journal.

On this number we include, the monographic has been coordinated by Juan Freire and it’s titled “Digital culture and creative practices in education”, consisting on five articles by Enrique Dans, Alejandro Piscitelli, Tíscar Lara, Aníbal de la Torre and Brian Lamb and Jim Groom; they all analyse the impact that digital technology and Internet are having on education, understood as a process based on knowledge, communication and social interactions. Professors and students face drastic transformations with the emergency of digital culture, which may cause the need of changes in educational institutions’ role and organization. <(p>

Another five articles complete the issue; one of them (Aguado-López, E.; Rogel-Salazar, R.; Becerril-García, A.; Baca-Zapata, G.) analyses the universities’ presence in the Network and the digital gap between United States and the rest of the world; the second one (Ávila, L.A.; Miranda, A.; Echeverría, M.R.) analyses the best ways of sharing information in virtual platforms and how virtual communities are constructed for investigation. Another of the articles (Bozu, Z.; Imbernon, F.) studies a work experience among Catalan universities aimed to create communities of practice and knowledge. In a fourth article (Rodriguez, A.) a personal experience tells us how people with visual disabilities can learn data processing sciences. Finally, the last article (Hermes, E.) deals with the pedagogical and reflexive use of the new technological tools as one of the main factors for the creation of processes enable to respond to the needs of the Knowledge Society.

Please, visit http://rusc.uoc.edu for further information about the issue (articles are available for download).

Related posts

• UOC opens up its teaching materials (0)
• UOC eLearn Center presentation (0)
• OER Remix: the game (0)
• Brian Lamb: the emergency of an open education (0)
• What would you ask to Twitter founder Jack Dorsey? (11)

Well, let’s just imagine that you have a chance to talk with Jack Dorsey, Inventor, Founder, & Chairman of Twitter, what would you like to ask him? Obviously, we are mainly interested on possible educational uses of this tool. Mature your thoughts, and once you find the great question, just leave it on the comments (remember, 140 characters maximum), because we are interviewing Jack Dorsey this week and want to count with your experience and interests. You can also send us (me, in this case) your questions via Twitter. Deadline for questions submission is wednesday 23:59.

Related posts

• Open interview with Jack Dorsey; is Twitter useful for education? (4)
• UOC opens up its teaching materials (0)
• UOC eLearn Center presentation (0)
• Twitter Literacy: what makes the tool valuable? (0)
• Symposium Expanded Education (ZEMOS98 International Festival) (1)