Educational policies on ICTs and educational innovation: Analysis of the programme Escuela 2.0

(this symposium, coordinated by Manuel Area Moreira, is framed in the research project Las políticas de un “ordenador por niño” en España. Visiones y prácticas del profesorado ante el Programa Escuela 2.0. Una análisis comparado entre Comunidades Autónomas.)

Manuel Area Moreira
An introduction to Escuela 2.0

Escuela 2.0 is a 1-to-1 or one laptop per child project that aims at:

• Offering social equity.
• Develops a national industry in the Knowledge Economy.
• Breaks the isolation of the school.
• Prepares the student to be a XXIst century citizen.
• Enables the innovation of teaching-learning methodologies.

But is technology changing the way we teach and/or students learn? What is being the impact of this project at the methodological level?

Juan de Pablos Pons (Universidad de Sevilla).
Educational policies and good practices with ICTs.

Beyond the typical issues related to infrastructures, it is still difficult that the teachers accept ICTs as an educational tool. And only after this has happened we will be able to talk about producing and/or reusing educational content.

To foster this adoption of ICTs in teaching, a good practices project was started so that actual implementations were shared and, after them, critical elements of success be identified. Good practices, to be qualified as such, must generate a transformation and cause a change.

Good practices were chosen in the field of training, pedagogical guides, teaching innovation, usage of the LMS and international projection.

As an overall conclusion on how the Andalousian teachers felt about Escuela 2.0, they are happy to have more infrastructure, quite well on being able to be trained on the use of instructional technology, but not very confident on the impact of ICTs on teaching.

Cristina Alonso Cano (Universitat de Barcelona).
Policies and practices around ICTs in compulsory education: implications for innovation and improvement.

The consolidated research group “Esbrina, Subjectivitats i Entorns Educatius Contemporanis” (2009SGR 0503) is dedicated to the study of the conditions and current changes in education in a world mediated by digital technologies and visual culture. The research group has a clear goal to acknowledge the potential of ICTs in education.

What should change in policies, schools and people so that the potential of ICTs in education can be realized?

• Questioning policies is a healthy exercise to be able to tell what is causing an impact and what not.
• It is very different to speak about Information and Communication Technologies and Learning and Knowledge Technologies, which ones are we talking about when we speak about technology and transformation in the learning process?
• Local and educational leaders and the community are normally banned from participating in ICT for education policies.

José Miguel Correa Gorospe (Universidad del País Vasco).
Eskola 2.0 Programme: What is it bringing to the educational change in the Basque Country?

(Eskola 2.0 is the Basque version of the Spanish state-wide Escuela 2.0)

Teacher training has been one of the most important flaws of the Eskola 2.0 programme. The programme was also imposed to the Basque school system, ignoring the dynamics of the centres, causing several tensions within the educational system and within schools.

Jesús Valverde Barrocoso (Universidad de Extremadura).
Escuela 2.0: unlearning and transformation vs. continuity and tradition.

During 2002, the region of Extremadura began introducing computers at school, on a one-computer-per-two-children basis. This happened in a much broader initiative (LinEx project) in the region to opt for free software and technological autonomy for the government as a whole, and for the educational system in particular.

Escuela 2.0 had several (and sometimes opposing) goals:

• Academic performance.
• Economic development of a local IT and digital content industry.
• Equity and fight against the digital divide.
• Digital competence.
• Quality of teaching.

Reality in schools: 1/3 of teachers use computers in the classroom on a daily basis, 1/3 use it occasionally, 1/3 never use it. 4/10 teachers use often the interactive digital whiteboard in the classroom.

Related to the methodologia, lectures are still the norm and there is few collaborative work. Indeed, the textbook is the pedagogical resource per excellence, even if there is an increasing demand of digital content.

The role of the IT coordinator is highly valued.

What are the effects of ICTs in the classroom? Above all, engagement. Then, digital competence. And at a distance, some minor improvements in academic performance in general or in some specific tasks.

Hints for the future:

• Flexibility in the kind of resources at the students’ reach.
• Adaptability, getting rid of the syllabus, use of Personal Learning Environments.
• -kess teaching, more learning.
• Sociability, teamworking, networking.
• Creativity.

Ángel San Martin Alonso (Universidad de Valencia).
Educational policies on ICTs and educational innovation: Analysis of the programme Escuela 2.0

When we foster innovation, is it to solve an emerging problem or because we need to keep the wheel of innovation moving and some innovation niches be fed?

Discussion

Teacher training appears on and on during the discussion. There is a total agreement that teachers have to be trained on the application of ICTs in education, on changing curricula, on adapting and transforming learning methodologies. But ICT for Education policies keep on insisting and spending most of the resources in infrastructures.

David Istance (Centre for Educational Research and Innovation, OECD)
Technology Use and Broader Models of Schooling and Learning — common arguments re-examined.

ICTs in education have been a matter of analysis and research since 1980s, including lot of work on adults and lifelong learning and technology, role of technology in higher education (especially e-learning), schools, digital literacy, curriculum change, students assessment, equipment, teacher training, leadership, open educational resources, millennium learners, etc.

More recent reports show the importance of digital literacy and competence in two ways: as a tool in itself, and as a means to achieve better performance on traditional disciplines, especially writing and reading.

Innovative learning environments

ILE aims to inform practice, leadership and reform through analysis of innovative configurations of learning for children and young people, on three strands: learning research, innovative cases, and implementation and change.

Learning conclusions. Environments should:

• Make learning central, encourage engagement, and be where learners come to understand themselves as learners.
• Ensure that learning is social and often collaborative.
• Be highly attuned to learners’ motivations and the importance of emotions.
• Be acutely sensitive to individual differences including in prior knowledge.
• Be demanding for each learner but without excessive overload.
• Use assessments consistent with its aims, with strong emphasis on formative feedback.
• Promote horizontal connectedness across activities and subjects, in-and out-of-school.
• All these characteristics should be present, and not just one or two of them.

So, is technology on of the learning principles? Maybe not. Technology is more implicit rather than explicit in the learning ‘principles’. There is the important distinction between technology-centred and learner-centred approaches to learning with technology:

• Fostering engagement.
• Learning with others.
• Supporting targeted respondses to difference and facilitating personalization.
• Underpinning assessment for learning.
• Providing connectedness (to others, to knowledge, etc.).

Motors and locus of innovation in education

OECD (2004). Innovation in the Knowledge Economy: Implications for Education and Learning analysed four sources of innovation or pumps:

• The science pump: knowledge and research.
• Networking pump: creating scale and synergies.
• The reorganisation pump: modular restructuring.
• The technology pump: more efficiency, new ways and means.

Education is not strong on any of these. On the other hand, technology is integral to all of them, not just in the technology pump.

There is a common framework implicit in much research and discussion of schooling an learning: system -> school -> class -> teacher -> learner. But, when we think about innovative learning environments, can we go beyond that framework? Can we go beyond institutional structures? Do we have to assume that institutions are given and are the existing ones? Does non-formal learning has a place in this framework? Can we have a look at the environment, and not at the single school, the single class, the single teacher, etc.?

New dynamics and organisation of learning environments:

• Who: learners.
• With whom: teachers.
• With what: resources.
• What: content.
• How: reorganized learning activities and pedagogies.
• Learning leadership.

This scheme has a result, which is learning, information about learning activities, learners and outcomes, upon which evaluation and assessment can be applied. Learning feedback comes at the end and can be used by the learning leader to restart the whole process.

This learning environment has to be embedded in a wider systemic framework. On the one hand, and at the micro level, it is closely related to the institutional environment. On the other hand, a+dn at the meso level, there are networks of environments and networks of practice. Last, and at the macro level, policy-setting and framing conditions determine the whole system.

The report Connected Minds, from the New Millennium Learners project, compares the competing ‘evangelist’ vs. ‘sceptic’ theses, states that technology and social media are importantly changing social and cultural environment, but there still is no evidence that young people want radically different learning environments. In fact, they want engagement, convenience (any time, anywhere) and enhanced productivity. There is, also, a need for working out the implications of the changing digital world for what schools should do.

How does the future of schooling look like? The OECD schooling scenarios:

• The bureaucratic system continues, and even gets stronger.
• Re-schooling I: Schools as focused learning organisations.
• Re-schooling II: Schools as core social centres.
• De-schooling I: Radical extension of the market model.
• De-schooling II: Learning networks and the Network Society.
• De-schooling III: Teacher exodus and system meltdown.

We need to reflect on what we want education for youth to look like, and see whether we can go beyond a single model (and single stereotype) of school for all aged 3 to 19 y.o. It should be possible to have an intense shared schooling experience, high quality and resourced for 3-13yo (bureaucracy and re-schooling), and diverse experiences, programmes and hybrids for all 14-19 y.o, including basic university (re-schooling and de-schooling).

José Antonio Millán
Digital prostheses in education: opportunity or consumerism?

There are, literally, hundreds of conferences around the world in the field of education, and hundreds of ways to use Web 2.0 tools in the classroom, as a quick search can tell. Almost everything can be used in a classroom. But, why should we?

Thoreau says, in Walden, our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end. So, can we really do now more things we previously could with our new pretty toys? Or are they just distractions?

Teachers tend to suffer from the “shiny penny syndrome”, that is, their attention (and efforts) gets caught by the latest technology or device. It is only natural, but it sometimes falls into technocentrism or technoeuphoria.

Educators should definitely have a critical approach to technologies and just say no to the fast and mindless adoption of the newest technology. That is not being a Luddite, but just do a rational use of technology.

Of course there are pros on the use of ICTs in education:

• Immediate access to huge amounts of information.
• Enhancement of creativity.
• Share and build knowledge collectively.

We have to try not to think on shiny devices and go back to the source instead. Understanding the code, made by people, by real humans, is getting back in touch with what humans intended with the technology they created.

Educational projects based on laptops in the school

Jesús Valverde, María José Sosa, María del Carmen Garrido (Universidad de Extremadura).
Expectations of educational change before “one laptop per child” or “1:1″ projects in the classroom.

Evaluation of the project “Escuela 2.0″ in Extremadura (a region in south-western Spain)

In projects based on laptops in the classroom, there has been a dominance of technological innovation over pedagogical innovation, without the educational community taking part of the decision-making, and with insufficient support of the educational system to this new organizational and conceptual model.

Surprisingly enough, ICTs tend to preserve the traditional teaching styles, and the “adaptation” stage usually takes quite long, as teachers do not take up on new roles.

Innovation happens without the support of either formal teams (e.g. departments) or informal teams (e.g. social networking sites), thus leading to frustration: only those that work collaboratively, share experiences, help others “survive”. Technological and organizational problems only come to worsen the situation.

Conclusions for policy:

• Necessity to build a community of teachers.
• Training in educational centres, with the help of virtual learning environments.
• Enhance the role of the ICT coordinator with a trainer in the same area of knowledge of the teacher.
• Strengthening of the technical support and improvement of infrastructures.

Fernandez Olaskoaga, L.; Losada, D.; José Miguel Correa (Universidad del País Vaco).
1 to 1 model: An implementation study in the Basque Country.

Evaluation of the project “Escuela 2.0″ in the Basque Country (a region in northern Spain)

Prior to the “Escuela 2.0″ state-wide initiative, there already was a 1-to-1 initiative in the Basque Country. The state-wide initiative “only” implied a change of model, but not the development of a brand-new project.

“Escuela 2.0″ provided netbooks for the kids, wifi connectivity in the classroom and digital classrooms (mainly digital interactive whiteboards).

An initial training was also scheduled, but only consisted in a very small test on general “computer science” knowledge. “Eskola 2.0″ (the basque version of “Escuela 2.0″) introduced some more training by programming several workshops. At last, a digital material aggregator was created (Agrega) where schools would upload their digital production.

Eskola 2.0 had three axis:

• A provision of resources: one laptop per child.
• A technological training, based on the TPACK model.
• Digital materials, uploaded to the Agrega initiative.

The teachers of the project answered a survey on the expectations about the project.

The most interesting outcome of the survey is that, in the short run, it was good to get devices (laptops, whiteboards) but that the rest (training, information, educational model, etc.) was negative or very negative.

In the medium run, though, the teachers expect to have the opportunity to follow some training, that there will be some pedagogical innovation, that the communication with families might be enhanced.

Telma Panerai; Gomes de Carvalho, A.B.; De Souza, B. (Universidade Federal de Pernambuco).
Embedding digital culture in some public schools in Brazil: the case of the one laptop per child.

One of the biggest problems in Brazil when it comes to the use of computers at school is cost. Cybercafes are an option for accessing the Internet or using a PC, but still, it does cost money. On the other hand, international connectivity is far from being optimal.

The first OLPC projects in Brazil started in 2007. In 2010 the project got to Pernambuco (a poor state in north-east Brazil). 4,000 laptops where provided to a 26,000 inhabitants city: that was quite a shock. Students would own the laptop, which provided both empowerment and responsibility… and the possibility of being robbed up. The computers were made by the Brazilian firm CCE and were called “uquinha” (small UCA, from Um Computador por Aluno – one laptop per child).

An action-research project was conducted from June to December 2010.

Students quickly stablish a process of digital immersion. The teachers, on the other hand, were anxious and insecure in the pedagogical application of the laptops, fearing loss of control. The learning process, though, was deeply changed: more students attended classes and the way they learnt was transformed. Public spaces were also reshaped, as students used them to access the Internet or study.

Noemí Martín; Cabré, J.; Sampé, M. (Universitat Rovira i Virgili).
Dialogical learning in a digital society: the experience of a rural school in Ariño.

(project in a rural school in Ariño, Teruel, a rural province in middle-east Spain, quite isolated from its surroundings)

How has the usage of ICTs in a rural area? How has affected learning? And kids’ lives?

What means “dialogic”? A dialogue amongst all the members of the community, where goals, means and processes are acknowledged by consensus.

The centre decided becoming pioneer in adapting ICTs in learning and evolving into a learning community. The centre, thus, went through different projects since 1999, ending up adopting the state-wide programme “Escuela 2.0″.

The project has implied new ways of learning, but also new social relationships, new relationships between the two local schools (which operate under the centre’s guidance), etc. Motivation of students increased, as did academic results. Families also were more implied in the learning process of their children, learning too how to operate computers, how to use them to learn, etc. And not only kids learn more, but master different competences that are understood to be crucial in an information society, like problem solving, autonomy, etc.

Discussion

Joan-Anton Sánchez: how can we go from the laptop as a mere digital container to a learning tool? A: it depends on your starting point. If, like in many Argentinian schools, books are scarce, having 100% of the children having a (digital) textbook that is a great improvement.

Joan-Anton Sánchez: laptops as institutional infrastructure or bring your own device? Again, it depends on whether the student already got an own device (and the new one is just an added cost) or the device is but a means to overcome the digital divide.

There is a growing consensus among the participants that more resources should be devoted to training, but not to courses or workshops, but to building communities of practice, not relying these communities of practice on everyone’s good will, but on liberating resources or workload for specific leaders.

Round Table: Looking into the future
Mark Bullen (British Columbia Institute of Technology), Roni Aviram (The Center for Futurism in Education), Norbert Meder (University of Duisburg-Essen), Martha Stone Wiske (Harvard Graduate School of Education).

Mark Bullen

It is very unlikely that the technologies that we might here identify as revolutionary will actually be that revolutionary in the following years. Take the LMS as an example: almost every university in the world is now using it, but has it brought the revolution in education it promised 20 years ago?

[personal reflection: I'm actually teaching with my LMS in ways I could not offline: collecting tons of news on RSS aggregators, collaborating with wikis, sharing with slides (the students' slides), debating with fora 24x7 amongst a group of 30+ people, etc.), staying tuned also 24x7 with microblogging, etc. LMSs being non-revolutionary, whose fault is it?]

How do we engage the faculty to try and get the best from LMSs? [that was exactly my point] How do we promote revolution within institutions?

Roni Aviram
Navigating through the Storm: A vision for a humanistic ICT-based education for liberal democracies in the 21st century

(based on Aviram, R. (2010). Navigating through the Storm: Reinventing Education for Postmodern Democracies).

We have witnessed 30 years of failures on the practical and theoretical/academic levels. “So much reform, so little change” or “the more it changes, the more it remains the same”. ICT have not made a sustainable contribution to learning or led to meaningful change in education.

So much talk, so little solid knowledge. There is no common language or methodological infrastructure, no value-oriented systematic thinking, very limited rational discussion, limited accumulation of knowledge (just anecdotes).

There should be well defined, systematic, value-oriented paradigms relating to the goals of educagtion and the ways to realize them in the crazy, chaotic, digital world we live in. And a formation of rational discussion and learning processed to go with it.

We need a humanistic vision for ICT-based education, based on the values of liberal democracies: personal autonomy, dialogical belonging, morality. The new humanistic vision should support flexibility, personalization, analytical abilities, support for reflection, infrastructure for exploration.

At the technological level, all of this is feasible. We “just” need to overcome 2,500 years of “Platonic” educational paradigm and the total “economization” of our societies.

Norbert Meder

We need to refocus on understanding, not on information collecting.

Media can be used for problem solving, for rephrasing old problems, for trying new things.

Martha Stone Wiske

Data, information, knowledge, understanding, wisdom. Too much of information is focused on the transmission of information and not enough on enabling understanding.

Mobile and multimedia tools are helping people to get closer to knowledge but, are we paying enough attention at how they are affecting too the way we think?

There are two axis to deal with: long-wide learning (at the school, at home, at work) and long-life learning. And they deserve different approaches.

We must extend our work as educators outside of the school and the university: we have to engage our learners with their learning in a way that lasts longer than their schooling years.

Discussion

Ismael Peña-López: I honestly think that the revolution will not come from us, the insiders, but from the outsiders. Institutions might be able to perform an evolution — which is good — but times are of a revolution. Political parties, newspapers, the entertainment industry crises, and it is not politicians, newspapers or artists the ones that will lead the revolution, but the people who love politics, journalism and culture. Same with education: there already exist things as open educational resources, remixing culture, badges, alternative reputation systems, crowdsourcing, MOOCs, PLEs that are providing good and sustainable alternatives to the educational system as we know it. It is just a matter of time that these new approximations to education are sustainable in time. We can now separate the content from the container, and think of ways of getting rid of assessment, evaluating teachers, credit recognition, reputation, promotion and tenure, research and focus on learning. We should start thinking about education and educators and not the educational system or educational institutions (Martha Stone Wiske points that this is especially true in college and higher education, and I fully agree with her in that point).

Digital society’s changes and challenges, and their implications for education

Rocío Rueda (Universidad Pedagógica Nacional).
Rethinnking digital society from expanded cultura and educational local experiences.

The Information Society implies new forms of capitalism, especially at the informational and cognitive levels. There are different changes taking place in a common context:

• Reflexive modernization, liquid modernity (Beck, Giddens, Lash, Bauman).
• Collective action and new social movements (Laclau & Mouffe, Escobar, Melucci).
• Informal politics in social processes (deSouza, Lechner).
• Economic and cultural globalization (glocalization) (Castells, Canclini, Barbero).
• Cultural and generational leap (Mead).

Theoretical framework:

• Foucault’s Postestructuralism
• Science and technology social studies (Langdon Winner, Latour, Callon)
• Feminist studies (Haraway, WAjcman)
• Studies of communication-education and culture, expanded educatoin (Freire, Barbero)
• Politics of happening, minor politics (Hardt & Negri, Lazzarato, Bifo, Virno)

Methodology: multisituated ethnography to analyze different initiatives/movements in Colombia: NASA-ACIN, Vamos Mujer, La Cápsula, Niuton, Mefisto, Chicas Linux.

Two type of technosocial settings: most of the times, politics determines technology; but some other times, technologies are used as political devices.

Expanded educational practices take place in hibrid times and spaces; the student becomes producer; the community becomes the driver of action, engagement and change. Technologies are not determinant, but determined by social uses. Expanded education practices foster sharing thus challenging the concept of private property, authority, authorship.

Micheál Ó. Dúill (Logios.Org)
Turing Teaching: Primary transition.

Some specific characteristics make humans human: we believe that language is unique to us, but it just happens that Neanderthals spoke as well as us. But they did not had technology or written language. If technology is simple (low entropy) and biology (us) is complex (high entropy), how is it that a high entropy system can produce a low entropy system, thus breaking the 2nd law of thermodynamics? The reason mgiht be that access to low entropy information is possessed by the genes and expressed in the phenotype.

The mechanism of technicity is based on the association of the executive sphere (lateral convexity, cognitive) with the sensori-motor sphere. External impulses are recognized by our low entropy information embedded in genes.

P-Concepts: derived from perceptual experience, mediated by language, Vigotskian socio-linguistic thought. P-Conceptually: square and diamond.

T-Concepts: derived property-of-mater information, mediated by cognition, scientific reality check. T-Conceptually: both quadrilateral.

3 modes of education:

• Neanderthal instruction (P): directly shows concepts.
• Grammar schooling (P & T): uses an external storage of information (e.g. book).
• Turing teaching (T): animation of externally stored information, it is the Turing machine made concrete, teaching tuned to the developing brain. The problem is that there is no curriculum and no teaching method.

John Moravec (University of Minnesota).
Technology and education in post-disciplinary society: Preliminary insights from the Knowmad Society project.

After Aprendizaje Invisible (Cobo & Moravec, 2011), there was a need to explore what was happening at work, especially at the level of nomadic knowledge workers or knowmads in the Society 3.0. Workers are increasingly less tied to their corporation, and increasingly do not identify work with jobs.

We cannot disentangle technology from learning and working and living… so what is learning in a knowmad society? Now, pedagogy is not about teaching, but about creating the conditions to learn.

We have to stop using technology to obscure education, but to improve the human experience, to disclose learning spaces, to foster relationships that are creative.

Knowmadic people work towards the creation of added value.

Alicia Beatriz Acin (Escuela Ciencias de la Educación, FFyH, UNC); Madrid, T.B. (Instituto de Formación Docente C. Leguizamón).
Distance education programme for adults: between traditional education and technological innovation.

Created in 2000 in Córdoba (Argentina) targeted to 21 y.o. learners with professional activities, extended to unemployed and youngsters. The syllabus is split in “modules” which have a 1-to-1 relationship with written modules. The programme breaks the trend towards homologation and recovers some principles in use in previous times, like giving credit to informal training.

The programme is based on e-learning methodologies where the module is the main tool and teachers are tutors or guides throughout the learning path.

Results: high degrees of autonomy, technology appropriation by students, contents as compendiums rather than cognitive mediators or tools. If students took a more active part in the design of the tool, their experience would be much better and their educational process would be highly improved.

Josefina Santibañez (Universidad de La Rioja); Ramírez García, A. (Universidad de Córdoba); Renés, P. (Universidad de Cantabria).
Media literacy in 65 y.o. adults in La Rioja in the context of Spain.

The goal of the project was anlyzing the level of media literacy amongst 65 y.o. adults in La Rioja (Spain) and then compare it with their peers in Spain.

Independent variables: gender, education level, training in audiovisual communication, professional experience related to media, age.

Dependent variables: aesthetic dimension (being able to evaluate formal innovation), linguistic dimension (being able to evaluate media codes and languages), ideological dimension (being able to analyse the values represented by a message), reception and audience dimension (ability to evaluate the process of message reception), production and programming dimension (ability to evaluate productive routines), technological dimension.

Conclusions show that elderly people have a deep lack of media competence.

Discussion

Janaina Minelli de Oliveira: is there a tension between self-interest and common interest? If we foster self-interest or self-realization, are we going against common interest? John Moravec: one thing is personal knowledge, which is about what can one do, and another one is how or where to apply that knowledge. I think those are two different spheres and not necessarily competing ones.

Punya Mishra
Creative Teaching with Technology: Introducing the TPACK Framework.

In technology and education, what do teachers need to know? First of all, that the Internet might be a much more important revolution to education than the wheel to transportation or steam engine to the industry… but let us be humble about predictions. Because it is all about how we frame technology.

Against techno-centrism: It is a huge revolution: the thing is that only two generations have past since we had computers, and a single generation has past since Internet/e-mail came up, and non since web 2.0 tools.

There are no such thing like instructional technology: there is technology that is applied, amongst other uses, to education. And there are also technologies not intended for educational purposes that are actually used in education, because users redefine technologies. This is especially happening in the field of ICTs: only repurposing makes a technology an educational technology.

The reverse is also true: technology also changes how we teach. But technology is not the target of teaching, but content. If you’re not going to change pedagogy then technology use will not lead to better learning. Teaching is about “something”, not about technology. Disciplines teach us to see: knowledge, purposes, methods, forms.

Technology also changes what we teach. Content from disciplines has changed due to technology.

Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) attempts to identify the nature of knowledge required by teachers for technology integration in their teaching, while addressing the complex, multifaceted and situated nature of teacher knowledge. At the heart of the TPACK framework, is the complex interplay of three primary forms of knowledge: Content (CK), Pedagogy (PK), and Technology (TK). As must be clear, the TPACK framework builds on Shulman’s idea of Pedagogical Content Knowledge.

Image from http://mkoehler.educ.msu.edu/tpack/what-is-tpack/

More information:

• The TPACK (technological pedagogical AND content knowledge) framework.
• Handbook of Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPCK) for Educators
• Koehler, M.J., & Mishra, P. (2008). Introducing TPCK
• What is TPACK?

Creativity is crucial, especially when relevant information is scarce… which usually is.

The Seven Trans-Disciplinary Habits of Mind which extend the TPACK (PDF): Perceiving, patterning, abstracting, embodied thinking, modelling, playing, synthesising.

Betty Collis
Digital Learners: Will they surprise us?

At the level of the processes of learning, there already is taking place a revolution on how digital learners are facing their learning. They may also be doing things differently, or in different places, or with different tools, or with different people… just may. But what are the results of this revolution?

New learners are using multiple tools, analogue/traditional and digital altogether, mixing physical and virtual environments.

The tasks that are being performed in new environments are not that new: communicating, asking, discussing, sharing; capturing, labelling, storing; finding, adapting, expanding, creating; listening, watching, reading, annotating, writing. But these tasks are being performed with crucial differences: range, functionalities, fluidity, depth, etc. And learners are making most of these decisions by themselves, not because they were told to by their instructors.

So, we can state that digital learners are following new processes by applying old and new sets of tools, both of them used in different ways. But what about the results of their learning?

It just happens that the results we get from students are highly dependable from the way we assess their performance. If we want different results emerging from different learning processes, we do need to also change the ways with which we assess learning. Indeed, the new different assessment should go in the line of not providing the “right answer” to a given question coming from some learning material, but engaging the student to contribute with more material, with more relevant questions on the topic.

In fact, as technology becomes more and more social, learning is more about learning together, about building a learning community. Thus, assessment necessarily needs to target the creation of a learning community and how much and how well a student contributes to it.

And, as a part of the building of a learning community, an arrangement has to be made to create an “authentic audience” for the projects beyond the instructor and classmates, to get feedback from the representatives of the external audience and make results available.

Keys of expanded learning (previously not possible without technology):

• Knowledge, insight to be demonstrated is specified but in the demonstration the learner has scope to surprise with results.
• Learners make use of the skills they already have in the process of learning
• The product fo the learning contributes tgo the learning of others.
• The instructor leads a scaffolding process: guides, gives feedback, steers, and refers regularly to assessment rubrics so “surprised” does not mean the learner feels lost in terms of expectations.

Some bibliography:

• Poole & Wheal. (2011). Learning, spaces and technology. Exploring the concept.
• Collis & Moonen (2005). An on-going journey: Technology as a learning workbench.
• Collis & Moonen (2001). Flexible learning in a digital world
• Sfard (1998). On two metahors for learning and the dangerfs of choosing just one. In Educational Researcher, 27 (2)
• Kearsley & Shneiderman (1999). Engagement Theory
• Prensky (2010). Teaching for digital natives.

Innovative uses of ICTs in teaching and learning processes

Jeff Miller (The University of British Columbia)
Beyond the Learning Management System: Integrating Social Media in a Master’s of Educational Technology Program.

30 students follow the Master of Educational Technology at UBC. The idea behind the project was open new spaces by means of social media.

Affordances/constraints:

• Who is “in charge”?
• Who has the ability and authority to write/speak?
• What design tools are available to teachers/students?
• Who decides on the structure/content of materials and activities?
• What is private and what is public?
• How do we track engagement out of an LMS?

At the end of the course, all the scholarship is public.

In another course (ETEC540), part of the course is sitting on WebCT, but another part of it is out on the open at the UBC Wiki for ETEC540. Blogs were also used, but it came out that blogs are much less creative than wikis. And normally, the outcome of materials made by the students is bigger than the original material that the teacher put initially on the course’s website.

One of the biggest design challenges is how to create a community in each and every space, how to engage the members of that community, foster creation and not passive “consumption” of (learning) material, etc.

A good practice is to use leading edge technology, but not bleeding edge one; negotiating public and private learning spaces; developing sustainable development and delivery models; negotiating new roles.

Alfredo Álvarez Álvarez, María Dolores Porto Requejo (Universidad de Alcalá).
Collaborative environments 2.0 in the learning of languages in the university.

Web 2.0 and higher education: enables learner-centered teaching, individualized monitoring (different learning paths), autonomy in the learning process, reflection over one’s own learning (self-assessment).

Web 2.0 and language learning: need of valid experiences, lack of measuring instruments, need to reorganize traditional competences.

Social networking sites offer the possibility to interact amongst one’s peers and this stimulates the generation of knowledge. This stimulation is enhanced by the novelty of the platform.

Wikis and Social Networking Sites (Ning):

• Enable “real” activities (not only for the teacher’s eyes).
• Enable constant revisioning.
• High level of participation.
• Do not normally pose any difficulty in the use of the tool.
• Higher levels of self-confidence, as one’s evolution is quickly realized.
• High degrees of autonomy in the learning process.
• New and crossed leaderships: students leading a given discipline (i.e. get higher marks) work together with other (usually different) students that lead the usage or appropriation of the technology.
• Stimulate collaborative learning.
• Open possibilities of team working.
• Are perceived as personal spaces, neither working or learning spaces nor institutional spaces.

Karina Olmedo, Mariona Grané, Lucrezia Crescenzi, Rafael Suárez (Laboratori de Mitjans Interactius – Universidad de Barcelona).
Integration of mobile devicees in traditional e-learning environments.

How do students value the use of ICTs and mobile devices in learning processes? How does the use of the Internet and mobile devices once they have been used for learning?

The project was carried out on a master’s course on community managing. The mobile device was an iPad.

Most of the interaction in the course took place on a forum. Interviews were used to get the evaluation of the students on their learning processes, the usage of technology during and after the course, etc.

Most of the students changed their behaviours concerning the Internet: kind of usage and, most especially, the places where they use to connect to the Internet and the amount of time connected during the day, etc.

Adelaida Martín Bosque (CEA – University of New Haven); Mar Mejías Caravaca (IES Abroad Barcelona).
Twitter en la clase de ELE: desarrollando la PLN (Personal Learning Network) de los estudiantes.

Undergraduate students from the US that study Spanish for a semester in Barcelona, on an A1.1. and B2.1 level course lasting 45-60h.

First steps: create a new twitter account. On the one hand, they will be twitting in Spanish, and their followers are (usually) non-Spanish speakers. On the other hand, because of privacy issues.

Hashtags will be used to monitor the conversation on Twitter. Of course, the hashtag can be used by other people not belonging to the course but willing to join the ongoing conversation. Some directions were given on the number of tweets, how interaction should be (e.g. addressed not to the teacher, but to their peers), and some hints on who to follow on Twitter (celebrities, writers, etc. in other words, to get out of the community of the classroom).

Some examples:

• Interaction with other users leads to language correcting amongst peers, or even self-correcting.
• Mentions to other users and usage of several hashtags out of the course’s one.

Pros:

• Establishment of a strong learning community: #dudasELE.
• Overcoming the barriers of time and space.
• Development and use of communicative and metacognitive strategies.
• Development of the student’s digital competence.
• Integration of Web 2.0 tols.

Cons:

• Lack of Twitter expertise.
• Interference with personal life (the solution being a new dedicated account).
• Lack of trust in the tool (“Why do I have to use Twitter?”)
• Increase of workload.
• Requires higher commitment from teachers (see #profesELE and #TwitterELE).
• Need to create a new way to assess: Twitter Rubric.

More information at: Cómo evaluar el uso de Twitter con estudiantes de ELE.

Present and future of PLE: conceptualization, practice and critic of Personal Learning Environments

Torres-Kompen, R. (Citilab)
Personal Learning Environments, the state of the question.

What environment? What kind of learning?

Traditional learning usually means time and space constraints, a scheduled structure, lack of flexibility and a given period of time.

PLEs are systems, based on social media, or web 2.0 tools, and many see them as a unique point of access to our digital persona. Other think of PLEs as a way to manage one’s knowledge and to monitor or track our personal learning process.

PLEs are usually defined as dichotomies: object vs. concept, personal vs. personalized, PLE vs. VLE, PLE vs. iPLE (institutional/institutionalized), lifelong vs. project-related, aggregation of free tools vs. mash-up system.

There are recurrent concepts around PLEs: web 2.0, e-portfolio, long-life learning, etc.

Most of the earliest literature was about defining what the PLE was and proposing structures or architectures for practical PLE. After that firts phase

• Buchem, I.; Attwell, G.; Torres, R. (2011). Understanding Personal Learning Environments: a literature review and synthesis through the Activity Theory lens.
• A wiki collection of PLE literature, source of the former article.
• A bibliography of PLEs on Mendeley.

Casquero, O. (Universidad del País Vasco); Peña-López, I. (Universitat Oberta de Calalunya).
Technological challenges (and strategy) of the PLE in educational institutions.

PLE (Adell & Castañeda, 2010): “the set of tools, sources of information, connections and actgivities that every person uses frequently to learn”.

PLEs have a place in higher education, and can be fostered by institutions: SAPO Campus, southhampton Learning Environment, SocialLearn, Google Apps for educatgion, VLEs “on steroids”… They all integrate external services, connect different tools, etc.

When institutions face fostering PLEs, they have to face two kind of users: the ones that already have a PLE and just have to connect to the institutional sphere, and the ones that do not have one and/or do not know how to build it. To the latter ones, the institution can provide an already-built PLE that the user will then be able to appropriate and customize: the iPLE (institutionally-powered or institutionally-enriched PLE).

But this does not only mean that the institution provides or allows third parties’ services within the institution, but also that the institution opens up its own (information) system so that it can be accessed from outside. This way, information can both flow inbound and outbound.

Strategy to put up an iPLE strategy:

• Creating a collective intelligence.
• Letting the community provide recommendations and resources, identifying resources and users that are critical for success, visualizing onw’s own activity, etc.
• An infrastructure based on nodes, connections amongst nodes, learn-streaming (automatically generating a record of one’s personal learning process).

Castañeda, L. (Universidad de Murcia); Adell, J. (Universitat Jaume I)
Methodological challenges of PLE.

PLEs should generate new methodologies. To do so, we have to know how knowledge is build. And knwoledge nowadays is extremely fluid. Learning has evolved from a cognitivist approach to the edypunk DIY, the Do It Socially, the Learn It Yourself and, at last, to the Learn It Openly or Social networked learning.

PLEs are — or should be — enriched learning environments. And enriching means, above all, decentralization, fragmentation. To be able to manage the decentralization of the sources of information/learning we have to be able to be autonomous in the management of these sources.

If sources are multiple, disciplines have to give way to more multidisciplinary approaches and ways to learn.

Again, the dichotomies: flexible vs. standardized, open and fluid vs. closed, integrated and competence-based vs. compartimentalized, independent vs. alone, autonomous vs. chaotic.

It is not about putting the PLE into the methodology, but that our methodologies take into account the students’ PLEs.

Ismael Peña-López (Universitat Oberta de Calalunya)
The PLE as a personal tool for the researcher and the teacher

Slides as a PDF:

Peña-López, I. (2012). The PLE as a personal tool for the researcher and the teacher.

Adell, J. (Universitat Jaume I); Castañeda, L. (Universidad de Murcia); Casquero, O. (Universidad del País Vasco); Peña-López, I. (Universitat Oberta de Calalunya); Torres-Kompen, R. (Citilab).
The future of PLE.

We should get over the conceptual debate, the acronyms, the nature or the concept, etc. and switch towards a theoretical expansion, a technological development, and, especially, towards context of application.

Theoretical expansion: deal with other educational theories.

Technological development: the LMS still is the core, but the architecture and the technological environment will be “2.0″. There is an urgent need to tear down the walls of LMSs, integrating tools 2.0, e-portfolios, etc.

Contexts of application: the revolution of e-learning, the training of educators, the educators’ professional training and long-life learning, etc.

The main challenges are how to drive changes within institutions and, most especially, within methodologies, the changes of role of teachers, etc.

Neil Selwyn
Social media, social learning? Considering the limits of the ‘social turn’ in contemporary educational technology.

It has become very difficult to talk about the Internet without talking about social media: the default will be social.

What are the key features of social media and what is their significance to contemporary education and learning? How are social media applications currently being used in education and/or by learners? What are the limitations — if any — of these new media in the educational field? What changes does education need to perform to adapt to the new social media landscape?

Internet applications have also transformed the concept of authorship: massive amounts of people create, share, distribute, remix content all the time, most of the times unintentionally or tacitly. There is now mass socialisation and mass participation. Internet

Different (philosophical) points of view on social media

• Increase informality
• Increase individualism, decentralizes power.
• Increases collectivism, is the group using a common shared tool.

Social media and education:

• Engaging: students like social media, so why should not education be using it?
• Empowering: anyone can create content, learn, etc.

Social media and educational institutions:

• Implies a deep reorganisation of educational institutions, making them more fluid, flexible.
• Can imply the replacement of educational institutions.

Social media as a context for learning: inquiry, collaboration, publication, literacy. But this hardly works within the boundaries of institutions. There still is a limited institutional use of social medial.

On the other hand, there are uneven levels of social media interest, access and usage amongst students. The “digital native” is a myth: there are (HJargittai & Hsieh, 2010) omnivores, devotees, samplers dabblers and non-users; or (Eynon & Mamlberg, 2011) active participators, all-rounders, normatives and peripherals. And social media is not levelling the ground, but just the contrary.

There also is a commodified nature of social media use. What you do on social media becomes a commodity: it is more important not what you did, but how many people liked it or followed it, how many people gave value to it… but you. And this affects people’s behavior.

And what happens with non-participation? Not to speak about the quality of participation: There is the usual rule of thumb of 1% people creating, 9% engaging/commenting and 90% just watching.

So, what should we do?

Are there differences in social media as a ‘learning technology’ as opposed to a ‘living technology’?
how do the creative, communal an productive practices and activities associated with social media fit with the practices and activities that are dominant in educational settings?<7p>

How could the educational community be better involved in shaping forms of social media along different, more educationally-orientated lines?

How can the educational community challenge the shaping of social media by commercial forces and other established elites?

Now that we are past the stage of hype and also the stage of disillusionment, now that we are reaching the “plateau of productivity” of these new technologies, we can reflect quietly and thoroughly about all these questions.

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Juana M. Sancho-Gil
Technological affluence, educational precariousness: a look at the last 20 years.

In the recent 20 years of instructional technology, everything that was said on technology belongs now to archaeology of technology, while what was said about pedagogy stands actual.

Some technologies are certainly not addressed to fulfil some existing needs, but do actually create new needs that come to existence once the new technology is widely adopted.

Do we understand everything that is happening in the field of technology?

Can we process all the information that is now available, that is now getting to us?

Who is the expert that will help us in finding a way through new technologies and information?
Certainly not today’s education, inflexible and aimed at marks and not learning.

New learners have multiple sources of information, and thus, they have new ways of learning. How is the educational system adapting to this new landscape? What should the educational system be doing?

Some initiatives:

• EdITLib
• Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI) – Schooling for Tomorrow
• Innovative Learning Environments
• Escuela 2.0

Some of these initiatives — the latter, for instance — are suspicious of being more a technological initiative rather than a pedagogical one, which poses many issues on its legitimacy, its suitability, its sustainability, its expected impact, etc.

What has actually changed in the last years in the school?

There has been a huge increase on assessment, especially based on standardized tests, with some “collateral damages” (Nichols and Berliner, 2007).

And we still think more in technological terms rather than on pedagogical terms, and many of these times to be able to control students: webcams in the classrooms, “check in” software to know whether the student attended class, etc. Of course, this does not mean that the teacher should not be digitally competent, which should.

In most recent years, this has been accompanied by a global crisis and budget cuts everywhere especially in education.

An agenda for the 21st century education

Encourage students to:

• Understand and responsible participate in a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) world.
• Continue learning throughout the whole life.
• Comprehend how knowledge interrelates. All knowledge is related to other knowledge(s).
• Be able to transfer knowledge and skills gained in one context into another one.

Some challenges to be met:

• Educate “symbolic analysts”.
• Consider the new forms of knowledge production, representation and transmission.
• Take into account the emergent contributions of the learning sciences and neurosciences regarding how people learn. And thus adapt our teaching to the findings of those disciplines, so to fit teaching with learning.
• Pay attention to the current diversification of ways and modalities of reading and writing (multiliteracies).
• Bear in mind learning experiences and a cultural background.

So, what technologies can help us in meeting these and other educational challenges?

Julià Minguillón, Academic Director, UNESCO Chair in e-Learning, UOC, Spain
Conclusions of the UOC UNESCO Chair in Elearning VIII International Seminar

Some selected statements made during the seminar:

• Teaching is about inspiring people. It is not only about transferring knowledge, or building skills.
• Ask yourself what your passion is, then learn.

You can ask your learners what their passion is, then teach. Share part of the control on the teaching process.

• Playfulness is within every child and adult.
• We can all be part of the “net generation”.
• No distinction between teachers and learners, especially because of age.
• Break the teacher-student hierarchy.
• Everybody can teach and learn and enjoy it! And at the same time.

• But teachers are not entertainers.
• But students are not only consumers or costumers.
• Don’t preach facts, stimulate acts.
• Promoting collaboration.
• Promoting self-directed learning.
• Promoting sharing.
• Social networks and web 2.0 tools can be a powerful tools.

• There are new opportunities brought by mobile technologies, PLEs, OERs, video…
• New literacies are needed: information seeking and filtering, content creation and curation, sharing and organizing, working in teams. And literacy is no only skills but attitudes.
• Old barriers need to be overcome: school/university structure and bureaucracy, assessment (or just scoring?), coping with fast endemic change, knowledge comes in standardized and isolated silos, low transfer from educational research into practice.

• Promote creativity in class.
• Take risks, you also learn from failure.
• Adopt perspectives from other disciplines.
• Create communities of practice.

Don’t let this seminar be another “ivory tower”: spread the word.

Teresa Guasch, Associate Professor, Psychology and Educational Sciences Department, UOC, Spain

Guillermo Bautista, Director of the Master Degree in Teacher Training – Secondary Education, Language Teaching and Vocational Training, UOC, Spain
Training new teachers for Secondary Education: trying out changes and improvements

How is teacher training understood in Spain, how should it evolve or what will be the new approach like, and what would be the main challenges for this evolution to take place.

Traditionally, teachers’ training in Spain was a compulsory short training course, focused in what to teach instead on how to teach. And it was a poorly legitimated course, mainly conceived as a formality.

So, there has been a long discussion around the topic and it was not until 2010 that a legal change was made: now, teacher training consists in a 60 EC master programme, with a common structure for all disciplines and students, and a specific part depending on each one’s original discipline. The common part is made up by several subjects related to learning and personality development; principles and models of educational intervention; society, family and education; and processes and contexts of education; curriculum counselling, educationa intervention for an inclusive education, innovation and research. A third module consists on a supervised practicum + supervised internship. At last, a master thesis is required.

Unlike the previous system, there is now a focus on the pedagogical and social aptitudes of the soon-to-be teacher.

The actual reflection now is about:

• Both in action and about action.
• Teachers’ collaboration.
• Have a global approach.
• How ICTs can be embedded into teachers’ development process.
• Ways of introducing an innovative teaching practice. Which most times means preaching by the example.

Main challenges:

• The design and structure of this programme is not enough flexible to contribute to the development of professional knowledge (different from academic knowledge).
• To develop a closer relationship between “teacher educator” and teaching practices.
• To contribute to the integration of ICT uses into everyday teaching-learning.

Discussion

Julià Minguillón: is there any community of practice for this course where people can share their knowledge and experiences? Guasch: That is certainly a very important observation, and this is definitely one of the next steps forward.

Edem Adubra: is this programme official / is there any authority that gives credit for this programme? Guasch: the general design for the programme comes from the Spanish Ministry of Education, so it is official and it is assessed itself. Afterwards, UOC provides its own approach, and it is this approach that can be changed, and being evolved.

Q: how are the schools that offer places for practices and internships chosen? Guasch: schools are part of the Spanish educational system and so it is quite easy to offer places, get in touch with the schools, work with them and coordinate the internships, etc. Indeed, collaboration with schools is very interesting to be able to reflect not only about internships, but about how the new student-teachers implement what they learnt and how the training programme provides answers and tools for them to be able to become real teachers.

More information

• Assessorament Curricular, official blog of one of the subjects of the Master in Secondary Education Teaching.
• Diseño de una webquest utilizando una wiki, official wiki of one of the assignments in one of the subjects of the Master in Secondary Education Teaching.

Jordi Blanch i Huguet, E-learning Coordinator, Ministry of Education of Catalonia, Spain

Jordi Moral i Ajado, Manager of Technological Resources, Open Institute of Catalonia (IOC), Spain

Diego Haro Nieto, Teacher Trainer for Preschool Education, IOC, Spain

IOC: an Experience in Changing Roles of Teachers and Students

The IOC is the Catalan Open High School, and have set up an online modality for 26,000 students — usually adults — to follow their courses online, many of them vocational training.

As many students have low educational profiles and are not proficient with technology, instructional technology is very transparent and is only aimed at facilitating the learning process. Thus, platforms the students are familiar with (e.g. Vimeo) are both used by IOC to upload learning materials or by the students to share their work.

A new software has been developed to monitor students’ practices in businesses that have partnered with IOC.

The tutor has great importance in the learning methodology of the IOC online edition.

On the other hand, remote access to “real” research and simulation infrastructures (e.g. labs in universities) are common so that the students can practice, from home, with the same infrastructures they are likely to use once out of high school.

The roles of the student and teacher have radically changed:

• The teacher proposes a work study plan.
• Students are the actors of their learning.
• The teacher stimulates the student, they are their guide, a travel companion.
• Students work in autonomous ways.
• The teacher is “who knows”, the expert, but they are learning too, even from the students.

Discussion

Q: who decides the content of videos? how are their made? Haro: content is decided by the teachers, as it is part of the assignment. Moral: students have to have the skills to tape, edit and publish video, as it is a very important tool. These skills are taught to the students in specific courses at the earliest stages of their learning.

Q: is there peer-evaluation? do students learn from each other? Haro: Students take traditional (face-to-face) exams at the end of the semester, and they are evaluated by teachers. But teachers do not usually share experiences, at least not within the framework of the courses.

Sigi Jakob: How is Mahara used for e-portfolios? Moral: Mahara is integrated with Moodle, which is the LMS of IOC, and each student is provided their own e-portfolio in Mahara.