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.

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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.

Continue reading »

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Jack Dorsey, CEO and founder of Twitter, toured Spain recently for several days. During his visit to Barcelona, we had the chance to share a conversation with him.

The idea was to make an open interview, based on the questions sent to us by Twitter users. After writing some questions of our own and selecting the most appropriate ones from the received ones, we met Jack Dorsey in a Barcelona Hotel on March 2nd.

Both sets of questions took as a premise the fact that Twitter is a very useful tool for educational purposes. During the documentation process for the meeting, we consulted some blog posts, lists of uses and articles analysing its educational uses.

The surprise came on the talk with Jack Dorsey. He is not specifically interested in education, and isn’t aware of the specific strengths or problems Twitter has in that field.

Alright, may be it is unsurprising for the CEO of such a valuable company. Even so, the rest of the story is on the video, please feel free to embed it on your web site using this code.

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The UNESCO and the U.S. Library of Congress, in collaboration with another 26 institutions from 19 countries, have launched today the World Digital Library, a content repository that allows users around the world to consult search and browse features in seven languages: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.

The idea of storing a wide number of historical documents (such as books, audio files, maps, pictures and videos) has been an aspiration for many people since the Internet was born. On my opinion that there were two important requirements on the development of this project:

• Technology: some years ago it would have been impossible to compile an store such a big amount of information and serve it to a big audience. The born of new formats and the lower cost of technologies made this project feasible.
• Authority: not everyone has the moral and legal authority to compile and offer all this information to the users. UNESCO is the most indicated institution for this purpose, followed by a very respected library like U.S Congress, which is the main contributor to the project.

Next steps on this way, says UNESCO, will be targeted to involve more institutions from all UNESCO member countries, increase the quantity and diversity of content on the WDL, forging mutually beneficial cooperation with other digital library projects and soliciting feedback from relevant user groups.

Despite of the fact that the content indexed on the WDL is copyright protected, its legal announcement recommends to consult copytight questions to each contributor partner. WDL is obviosuly an open educational resources project, but as long as it allows us the access to key and historical documents easy and freely, it’s importance and utility is not debatable.

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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).

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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.

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Roger Griset has a diploma in Library Science and Documentation from the University of Barcelona. He is currently working on the OpenCourseWare website at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (Open University of Catalonia, UOC) where he forms part of the Learning Resources group. He also participates in innovation projects linked to the University’s teaching materials.

Starting point

Since it began, the UOC has always invested in creating and producing specific teaching materials that adapt to the UOC’s own distance education-oriented methodology. These materials are used in the teaching and in the UOC students’ learning process.

Where are we?

Since 2008, certain contracts for authoring and ceding usage rights include a clause that lets the University publish these materials under an open licence. Thanks to this authorisation, some materials have been published on the UOC’s OpenCourseWare website, which already holds hours of materials for around thirty subjects. We plan to expand the subjects currently on offer (and others) with new open content in the future.

Where do we want to go?

The UOC is currently working on a Director Plan for Learning Resources that is to set the guidelines for the coming years. As well as the obvious financial and sustainability aspects involved in this kind of open resource, the Director Plan is, inevitably, going to be influenced by two trends affecting the world of higher education: firstly, the movement to open-access scientific literature at universities, including educational resources; and secondly, the new educational trends (connectivism and social constructivism) and the reform of the European higher education system (EHEA), which bring a new focus on contents in the framework of teaching.

The two aforementioned trends have already had some effect, and have changed our way of thinking and working over the last three years. Since 2005, materials have been produced in XML – allowing us to reuse them. Thanks to this, in 2009, we now have a large amount of materials published in new formats: audiobook, videobook and ebook.

Upcoming challenges

We still have a long way to go before the UOC’s teaching contents can meet the full definition of OERs:

• Break down the contents into smaller units (teaching materials are currently over 200 pages long).
• Make production of materials more flexible, so that faculty can publish their own smaller resources more easily and more quickly, without doing away with the University’s centralised management that ensures the minimum quality standards.
• Create tools for collaborative production of materials within the University.
• Aid the production of materials in web formats: blogs and wikis.

We have made important progress by starting to open access to our contents. The rest will come with time and effort.

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http://unescochair.blogs.uoc.edu/video/smetroslarge.flv

Susan Metros presented at UOC UNESCO Chair in e-Learning Fifth International Seminar her particular point of view of how Visual Literacy should be done in what she calls “the age of the Big Picture”. Now that images (of any kind: still, motion, print, digital, etc.) are running the world of communication, it’s sad to check how the youngest are used to decode visual messages but barely know how to create them. Susan Metros conference, now summarized on this video, is a great guide to visual literacy. Don’t miss it.

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Susan E. Metros (University of Southern California) also visited Barcelona on November 08 to attend UOC UNESCO Chair in e-Learning Fifth International Seminar. Her expertise areas combine graphic design, e-Learning and visual literacy.

Her conference, entitled “Visual literacy on the age of the big picture”, was a theorical session about how can we define visual literacy, a discipline everybody has asumed as a very necessary one. However, visual literacy doesn’t have its own theories, it borrows from several other disciplines. All about the topic on Susan Metros’ extended video, to be published on Monday March 23th.

Meanwhile, if you want to embed this teaser on your website you can use this code.

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