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.

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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.

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The Universitat Oberta de Catalunya has recently created the eLearn Center, a new office that reunites all the e-Learning related initiatives of the institution. Both research projects and diffusion activities will be now marked with the new Center anagram.

UOC UNESCO Chair in e-Learning will also be incorporated on the eLearn Center structure.

The new Center is being presented today at Barcelona Support Center with interventions from Imma Tubella, Rector of the University, Begoña Gros, Vice Rector of innovation and Paul Kirschner, Director of Research of Lifelong in the Professions, Netherlands Laboratory for Lifelong Learning (NeLLL), Open University of the Netherlands. Afterwards, there will be a roundtable with Ramón Capdevila (Universia), Jordi Vivancos (Education Department, Generalitat de Catalunya) and Luis Collado (Director of Google Book Search), the three of them will debate about Innovation and research networks creation.

Live notes from the eLearn Center presentation:

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The sentence above is the title choosen by Javier Martín to open a very interesting articled featured yesterday on El País, one of the most important Spanish newspapers.

On his piece, Martín speaks about the use of videogames as a learning tool, which was the main topic of the ECGBL 2008 Congress, announced on this blog by one of his organizers some weeks ago.

The article also features some of the most interesting opinions of Professor Sugata Mitra and, of course, an explanation of his “Hole in the wall project”. The main novelty of the article for the readers of this blog might be the list of competences announced by the MacArthur Foundation as result of the study “Media education for the 21st century“:

1. Play: experiment with the context
2. Act: adopt different identities
3. Simulation: interpret and build dynamic models from the real world.
4. Appropiation: assuming ideas and rebuild them onto multimedia materials.
5. Multitask: scan the context and change the target if it is needed
6. Distributive knowledge: interact with tools in order to distribute our knowledgement
7. Collective intelligence: gather information and share with others in order to achieve a common target
8. Common sense: evaluate the credibility of the different sources
9. Transmediatic: follow the trace of stories and informations through different methods
10. Connection: search, summarize and distribute
11. Negotiation: move between the different groups respecting multiple perspectives.

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Just a quick post to announce that we have already uploaded all the pictures from UOC UNESCO Chair in E-Learning Fifth International Seminar: Fighting the Digital Divide through Education to our Flickr account. We will upload more seminar content during the next days, so stay tuned. Meanwhile, a slide of the seminar pictures:

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a line of screens, originally uploaded by phitar.

Note: this was mostly written last Friday, and I only write here a small fraction of what I wanted… But I do not want to hold this post hostage until I get it right.

I do not have the time, bandwidth (technological, cognitive), or battery life to properly respond to this week’s sessions at the UOC’s Open EdTech and UNESCO Chair in E-learning Fifth International Seminar: Fighting the Digital Divide through Education conferences. Though again, I am pleased to point you to Ismael’s incredible liveblogging performance - and I believe the video archives will soon be available.

I will say that I was as provoked and moved by Dr. Sugata Mitra’s session on his Hole in the Wall project (also here) and subsequent work as by any session I have ever attended. I won’t attempt a synthesis, but will suggest that watching his TED Talk will be twenty minutes very well spent.

And two sets of related questions that I can’t get out of my head:

• If we can so rapidly mobilize a trillion dollars or more to rescue a financial system from the incompetence, greed and depradations of the people who are still in charge of it, is it not in our self-interest to spend a small fraction of that amount for the countless millions of extraordinarily deprived and vulnerable children of the world? Dr. Mitra estimates a cost of 3 cents US per student per day for his method. If we won’t do it because it’s the humane thing to do, let’s do it out of our own self-interest and self-preservation (if nothing else, think of the global conflict and security implications).

• What are the broader implications of “minimally invasive education” and “self-organizing educational systems”? Dr. Mitra is convinced that these methods cannot work for adults. Based on my own instinct and experience, I have to reluctantly agree with him. Why not? And what would adults need to unlearn in order to learn the way these kids do? I again find myself thinking that the teaching of skills is less important than changing attitudes - but I have no idea how best to do so.

Finally, thanks to the scale and intimacy of this week’s events, I (and members of my family) had the privilege to spend time interacting socially with Dr. Mitra in a casual environment. He was unfailingly kind, generous, irreverent and immensely amusing, evidently more or less devoid of ego… Funny how so often the most impressive people I meet in this field seem to share those attributes.

Hopefully I’ll have more reflections on this remarkable week in future posts.

uocunescoseminar2008

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Mr. Manuel Castells, Chair of the University’s Research and PhD Scientific Committee and patron of the new honorary doctor has introduced Sir Tim Berners-Lee reminding us the importance of the www invention. After reading his resume and most important honours, Castells has finished his introduction with a very emotive sentence: “Without you, Sir Tim Berners-Lee we wouldn’t be here, on this university, and we wouldn’t count with 45.000 on line students”.

After Castells intervention and the investiture photo, Ravid Goldschmidt has delighted us with a musical break playing the piece Novetats de Nova Zelanda on the hang. The delicious musical notes introduced the honoured speech.

Now, some quotes from Berners-Lee’s intervention:

• The Web is just a platform for people to do new things
• Lots of things that happen on the web are there just because someone else let them happen, and let people go on with their ideas… just like the Web, that in a first draft was dubbed as vage… but exciting.
• Keeping one web is important, securing that computers still speak the same language, the same protocol, one to each other.
• Why does the web work? Because one person puts a link, and somebody else follows it. So, understanding people is (or should be) the first step in computer science and, indeed, in designing and developing the Web of the next years. This is the aim of Web Science, to gather under the same roof computer scientists, who know about computers, and other disciplines, the ones who know about people. Web Science is about bridging the people that understand technology and people that understand people. Technology is created for the sake of Humanity, not the other way.

Thanks a lot to Ismael Peña for compiling the quotes at Ictlogy.net.

Update (13/10/08)

The act videos are already available here.

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The following text has been crossposted from Richard Stallman: Free Software and Beyond, liveblogged notes taken at the conference by Richard M. Stallman at the First International Conference Free Knowledge, Free Technology – Education for a free information society in Barcelona (Spain), 15 July 2008, on the production and sharing of free educational and training materials about Free Software.

The conference deals first with the concept of Free Software to then enter broader and deeper considerations about Freedom in the Information Society. The speaker reflects about how the pervasiveness of computers as tools implied in almost every socioeconomic aspect makes the debate about Free Software actually a debate about Freedom in general.

Richard M. Stallman, president of the Free Software Foundation
Free Software and Beyond

Free Software is about giving freedom to the user and respecting the work done by the community of programmers.

The analogy with cooking recipes is clearly the best way to help people understand the four freedoms of Free Software.

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Just a quick post to announce an interesting event. Free Knowledge, Free Technology will take place in Barcelona, Spain, from July 15 to 17. The idea is to debate the concepts around free culture (always understanding free as in freedom) and it’s particular application onto education processes. This year’s FKFT schedule includes speakers like Richard Stallman.

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As the main speaker of last week’s Data Mining conference, Sebastián Ventura left us a very interesating presentation. My proposal: let’s check the slides again (in Spanish, sorry) and try to compile some important questions about Data Mining in E-Learning. To be continued:

| View | Upload your own

Related entries:

• Some Data Mining presentations
• How can we measure the students behavior in a digital environment?

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