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)
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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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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This post is egocentric, I’m really sorry about that. But let me continue, you might find some useful information though.

I have to introduce Brian Lamb this evening at Zemos 98 Festival, so I have decided to organize my ideas about him in this post as a previous exercise to my spoken introduction.

I completely agree with novelist Vladimir Nabokov: one of his biggest reasons in order not to give live interviews was that he was much better writer than speaker, so why should he speak about his novels? I feel in a similar way every time I have to speak to an audience. That’s why I have decided to write this post, I prefer to put my ideas on a text before communicating them in a talk.

I heard about Brian Lamb many times, all of them by some of my colleagues telling wonderful things about how this professor innovates in the use of learning technologies. Everybody was speaking about him in such a good way that in my mind he became like a untouchable pope with miles of distance between me. That image soon felt when I met him personally. It was during UOC UNESCO Chair in e-Learning Fifth International Seminar, where he assisted as part of the audience: dressed up with a black shirt with big white music keys in. To me his image was near to one of those Nudie country suits. Weird for a Canadian teacher, isn’t it? I thought the same.

After this first impact I started to talk with him and to me he seemed a really nice person, he was actually trying to speak some Spanish so that I could feel more comfortable with him. We didn’t talk about e-Learning, neither about technologies or mash-ups, we spoke about his son and family, for at that time he was a visiting professor at UOC and had his family (including his girlfriend’s mom) with him.

The rest of the things I know about him I learned from his weblog:

He is an expert on social learning and open education, formerly Emerging Technologies Discoordinator with UBC’s Office of Learning Technology.

A fast look to his weblog give us very interesting information: his very innovative idiosyncrasy as learning professional is accompanied by a very acid and fun sense of humour. Some of his most famous articles are titled making funny (and atractive for the audience) winks to cultural stereotypes and myths. For example:

• Dr. Mashup: or, Why Educators Should Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the Remix (aka Dr. Strangelove, or how to stop worrying and love the bomb, Stanley Kubric film, 1964)
• Taking a Walk on the Wiki Side (aka Take a Walk on the Wild Side, Lou Reed, 1972).

Brian is also a very valuable speaker. Let me summarize some of the ideas he recently expressed on an interview published at UOC’s web site:

• About educator refusing technological innovation:
  

  There are a lot of really legitimate grounds to feel insecure, but I believe that if the university addresses those challenges head on it can actually thrive in a more open, disaggregated knowledge environment, really actively engaging the wider community.

• About Web 2.0 uses in education:
  

  My approach is to look at what is working out in the Web 2.0 and try to see what lessons we can learn. And it seems like the projects that are successful there have an invitation to participate as a big part of that. It is the idea that individuals doing the things that they want to do can nonetheless be part of something bigger. The opportunity to offer feedback, the idea that a piece of media once created can be replicated, adapted and mixed with other pieces of content…

• And some more, just see how he inspires others. In this case is Jim Groom, creator of the term edupunk, writing:
  

  The ability for Brian to simultaneously challenge and embrace ideas may be facilely discounted as contradictory or incongruous. But, in fact, it is this faculty that made this talk so deeply inspiring, it wasn’t only unbelievably gripping as performance, it was also deeply evocative as a means to elegantly problematize while affectionately living within some of the basic tenets supporting the infra-structural ideas of educational technology. Brian’s final slide sums it up even more eloquently…

These are just some examples of Lamb’s value as a educator and speaker, but there are many more. Some of them will be shown today at his talk, some of them will be appearing on his weblog. The rest of us should just sit down, open our mind (as Jimi Tenor says, they should be like open books, so that we could read some others mind easly) and let him inspire us.

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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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It was a great pleasure and honour to share a working day with one of the most influential writers about the Internet. As Howard Rheingold says on the video teaser we published some days ago, he has been working on the creation of development of a lot of on line communities. Based on this experience (and with the security that not all of them are going to be successful), Rheingold explained the keys to build up a community with high probabilities to succeed. In my opinion, this video (this master class) is useful not only for those professionals interested on the field of e-Learning, but for any smart Internet user too.

Please, don’t hesitate to leave a comment on this post to start a conversation about the topic that might be profitable for all. In addition, if you want to embed the video on your site, the code is available here.

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