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.

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.

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.

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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”:Click here to view the embedded video.

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• 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.

• 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.

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.

About the authors:

Teresa Romeu – UOC

Teresa is a lecturer in the Digital Literacy area of the IT, Multimedia and Telecommunications department and on the Master’s Degree in Education and ICT at the UOC.

Her research focuses on educational technology and e-learning and, more specifically, on teamwork in virtual environments, online teacher training, multimedia teaching materials and digital literacy.

She has worked on several research projects like FREREF (Fundation des Régions Européenes pour la Recherche en Education et en Formation), PROFIT Acción Avanzada, the Elene-TT (E-Learning Network for Teacher Training) European project, and on some Catalan government projects on ICT competences and knowledge, 2005-2006.

She is currently taking part in the Elene-TLC European project, 2007-2008, and “Políticas y prácticas en torno a las TIC en la enseñanza obligatoria: Implicaciones para la innovación y la mejora”, 2007-2010. She has published several papers and participated actively in international conferences and workshops in her knowledge area.

Montse Guitert – UOC>

She’s PhD in Education from the University of Barcelona, 1995, on educational technology and Lecturer in higher education at the UOC since 1995. She is currently Director of the Digital Literacy area in the IT Multimedia and Telecommunications department. Her research focuses on educational technology and e-learning and, more specifically, on teamwork in virtual environments, online teacher training, multimedia teaching materials and digital literacy.

She has worked on several research projects like PROFIT Acción Avanzada, Spanish Ministry of Technology, FREREF (Fundation des Régions Européenes pour la Recherche en Education et en Formation), COLLEAGUE (Collaborative Learning in Virtual Environments), the Elene-TT (E-Learning Network for Teacher Training) European project, and on Catalan government projects on ICT competences and knowledge. She is also currently taking part in the Elene-TLC European project.

She has published several papers and participated actively in international conferences and workshops in her knowledge area.

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.

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.