ICTlogy

Notes from the UOC UNESCO Chair in e-Learning Fifth International Seminar. Fighting the Digital Divide through Education.

Reflections & Conclusions

The real fact of the digital divide

• Multiple factors
• Many different (digital) divides, in relationship to context: culture, geography, education, wealth
• Where to start? Many and different approaches

Importance of the “digital” issue

• The “digital” embedded in the socioeconomic divide
• The “digital” embedded in the education divide
• What’s the relationship between digital and analogue variables

ICT4D

• Awareness raising
• Build from previous experience (e.g. best practices)
• Open processes, open outputs, open participation
• If added value, will to pay (i.e. impact and sustainability)
• Evaluation, assessment

Community

• Communities of practice
• Leveraging communities by focusing on their needs
• Self-organization
• Partnerships
• Networks
• Distributed agoras to debate

ICTs and Education

• Technology not to replace the teacher
• Need to train teachers in ICT usage
• Who’s the expert? The role of youngsters
• Relevance of open content (i.e. OER)
• The networked, multidisciplinary and multicultural teacher & faculty
• Gain from system disruptions to review teaching & assessment

Digital literacies

• Multiple literacies: textual, visual… and language
• Evolving and pervasive nature of digital literacies
• Digital skills as part of the curriculum, embedded in the whole educational process
• ICTs as a language, not just technology
• Training the trainers, educating the educators

What’s next? (VI Seminar 2009)

• Best strategies of knowledge diffusion
• Semantic web in Education
• Teacher training in the Information Society
• Awareness raising in policy-makers and decision-takers
• Education for citizenship, values and attitudes
• Back to open education
• Social learning, peer learning, emergent learning

Acknowledgements

I would personally like to thank the speakers — for their collaboration —, the audience — for their engagement and participation — and, most especially, to Carlos Albaladejo for being a perfect partner in this trip.

Notes from the UOC UNESCO Chair in e-Learning Fifth International Seminar. Fighting the Digital Divide through Education.

Begoña Gros, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya

65% have computers at home, but half of them have access to the Internet. 70% of companies have access to the Internet, but the use of the Internet drops to 50%. Access of citizens to e-Administration is about 45%. 90% of schools and 100% of universities are connected to the Internet, however teachers are not using it for teaching.

Digital natives? = Digital Fluents?
Tíscar Lara, Universidad Carlos III

Being fluent and being stimulated has nothing to do. From the technological paradigm to the communicative and social paradigm.

Digital skills

• information access
• information use
• fluen in different languages and media
• critical thingkin
• knowledge share and publication
• collaborative work
• social values and citizen awareness

Product, write, construct, encode vs. analyze, decode. For the first time both sides of the equation are available to everyone.

More than using technology, it’s better to learn how to take be in a participative culture.

When designing curricula, we should forget about hardware and software, but being centered in problems:

• building and managing a digital identity
• privacy
• intellectual property
• what does it mean being a consumer in the Information Society
• how to understand marketing and advertising

Above all, values have to permeate the whole process of acquiring and using digital skills:

• Fake culture can be very creative and thrilling and liberating, but, on the other hand, we have to tell truth from lies.
• We are constantly exposing our privacy — and our familiars’ and friends’ — and we have to be aware of the pros and cons of such exposure
• Have to learn to distinguish information and advertisements
• Amateur vs. professional

Digital literacy, what for? A digital literacy tied to values and citizenship:

• Have voice for awareness
• Engage in civic participation
• Reduce any divide
• Build a better world

Interactional Space
Javier Nó, Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca

The space determines the educational behaviour. Physical space and technological environment determine interactions. People are part of the environment.

An specific interactional space is the definition of the environment where communication takes place. A learning space is an interactional space that has to be designed. Which are the features of the environment taht produce effective interactions?

Dimensions that have changed that enable universal access

• Physical access
• Digital skills
• Affordance: usability
• Affordance: language
• Affordance: visual literacy
• Affordance: accessibility

Affordance takes access to another level, beyond “just” access.

Digital skills are not enough: the Internet is a specific culture with rules, meanings, organization and a visual language created and negotiated by a very small group of users… the users that have the power to negotiate.

To be able to be part of the Net, one has to understand this culture beyond just practical skills. And to negotiate the culture of the Net, one has to be engaged and implied. So, the question is how to design a space to promote implication, so that, through implication, comprehensive and shared meanings are created.

There is a trade-off between the certainty that is needed for structured knowledge, vs. the uncertainty that an innovative environment brings with it. How to deal with this? How to match innovation with structured knowledge and education?

The crossroads, the interactional space: affordance, negotiation, certainty.

Pedro Aguilera, Fundación Esplai

Mission of Fundación Esplai: to educate during leisure time.

Projects to overcome the digital divide: Red Conecta and Conecta Joven.

The digital divide is but a reflection of social exclusion. We have to avoid the “ostrich strategy”: “technology is not my business”. But also, the technological hype: “we have to wire everything”. In between both models, strategy, step by step processes.

Four main drivers: to reduce the digital divide, to improve employability, to take advange of the potential proximity of the organizations, to eliminate mental and physical barriers.

The usual question is not “how can I use technology”, but “why do I need technology”.

Three main lines of action:

• Training: functional digital skills
• Community strengthening: learn a common “language”
• Access to labour market

Main targets: women over 45, immigrants, unemployed, elderly people, youth at risk of social exclusion, poverty pockets, people from disadvantaged neighbourhoods.

Telecenters are part of the local NGO, to embed it inside an existing local community. Besides saving money by saving resources, the participation inside the community makes the e-inclusion projects way more powerful and socially sustainable.

On the other hand, telecenters work within a network to share resources, methodologies, etc.

The central key of the e-inclusion methodology is the person, the telecenter motivators: people can’t trust a machine, people trust persons. These motivators have at their own reach many resources to support their work: handbook of the “perfect motivator”, a network of motivators and online cooperation tools, tool-kits, etc.

The key issue is understanding e-Inclusion as a social project. As such, partnerships have to be build with local NGOs, Enterprises and the Public Administration being part of them.

Q & A

Mariana Petru: we have to be able to speak both of digital skills and digital competences. Besides, the cultural fact and self-awareness is also a very interesting one. We have to include in training the learning to learn part, and the learning from one’s own life part. Tíscar Lara: Learning to learn is so transversal that it has to be embedded in all disciplines and across the whole educational process. Javier Nó: if we are able to innovate the learning process itself, then all this things will come together.

Francisco Lupiáñez: is there a need to speak about the digital divide if everybody agrees that technology is not the key? Pedro Aguilera: the digital divide is, of course, but a part of a whole. But is a good indicator and a good way where to start. The e-inclusion is a crack in the exclusion wall that you can leverage to achieve broader goals. Tíscar Lara: it is true that we are seduced by ICTs, but ICTs are so comprehensive that approaching them you’re actually approaching a really broad range of “divides”. Javier Nó: ICTs have a versatility you do not find in the “analogue” world.

Linda Roberts: Should people have to learn how to use ICTs at all? What happens with multiculturality? Javier Nó: Of course, best of options would be that people learnt but that what they learnt was a technology designed for and by them, in a dialogue, in an agreement. Pedro Aguilera: ICTs enable multicultural preservation and even enhancement, way higher traditional means of communication.

Notes from the UOC UNESCO Chair in e-Learning Fifth International Seminar. Fighting the Digital Divide through Education.

Curriki
Linda Roberts, Curriki

The way we make progress, is doing things: the power of taking risks, and not being satisfied with small successes.

A change of paradigm: the Participation Age. This is why global connectivity, global access, the global network come so important.

The Mission: eliminate the Education Divide. Content is abundant, but it’s embedded into expensive devices (i.e. textbooks). How to make it available?

The Internet is a great World equalizer and the Open Source community has proven to be the hallmark of the “Participation Age”.

We’re shifting from a linear knowledge space (the classroom, the library) towards a random knowledge space (the Internet). Clayton M. ChristensenDisrupting Class: how to benefit from the innovation that this disruption represents.

Open Education

How open is open? can you build courses and curricula collaboratively? Can you trust the community?

If the materials are as open as open education (should be), then even an improvement in the economic model of delivering education also can come to existence, shifting 1/3 of the budget from learning materials towards teaching and teachers and guidance, which is what is scarce: time.

Strategy

Build a portal, a community of educators, a repository of open educational resources, and a global community.

Find, contribute, connect, and at a global level, with materials and whole courses in several languages.

Personalization is also made possible by creating personal collections of resources.

Q & A

Paul West: Is Curriki going to be around in, say, 3 years? Is anybody going to use it? A: Hope yes, because the world is going to be global in essence.

Susan Metros: How to take the content out of these collections, rebuild it and make it available worldwide? Could it be a business strategy that made the project sustainable? A: The problem (or positive thing) is that the people that create the materials they do it for their own reasons and a business plan is not in their equations. So, how to get support from the community without bothering them in things they’re not interested in? Providing evidence should suffice to raise funds, but maybe alternate models had to be approached. The matter is that, even in the open community, a business plan (not for profit, but a business plan anyway) has to be kept in mind.

Tim Unwin: what about the commoditization of Education, where you have to pay as an investment in yourself? How does this philosophy cope with the open paradigm? A: We should be able to make come the pieces together, and every time we do something we should be able to both generate value and show we do. It’s not enough to know you’re making an impact, but it has to be grounded on evidence. And the community can play an important role in this, as diffusers, as prescriptors. And, indeed, evidence needs to be collected and analysed: research should back all decisions, developments, etc.

Mara Hancock: How do people discover things like Curriki? How to promote not findability but discoverybility? A: To intentionally bring in relevant and active people that already are players in their own field. Also, know the language the community is already using, and know what the community is looking for.

Susan Metros: How can things made been easy? I want everything one click away.

Tim Unwin: I don’t want anything, I want what’s best. Amazon’s suggestion system is just this.

Ismael Peña-López: Leveraging the power of an existing community should boost findability, ease of use, discoverybility, filtering…

Julià Minguillón: the community can also help to build a reputation system that can nurture a (future) semantic web.

Notes from the UOC UNESCO Chair in e-Learning Fifth International Seminar. Fighting the Digital Divide through Education.

Hole in the Wall
Sugata Mitra, Newcastle University

Strong correlation between school performance and geographical distance from Delhi, the capital: the longer the distance, the lower the performance. Teachers from rural areas, indeed, do want to move to Delhi or closer to the capital, to an urban centre. Remoteness reduces the quality of education.

But remoteness not necessarily has to be geographic: there is some sort of “quality remoteness”, where some teachers want to get closer to “good” schools, and feel remote by staying in a low quality school. Remoteness, thus, has many shapes and depends on the cultural, economic, social, geographical, etc. contexts.

Alternative primary education is needed where there are no schools, or schools are not good enough, or where there are no teachers, or where teachers are not good enough.

Educational technology should be designed for and reach the underprivileged first. Indeed, educational technology is perceived to be over-hyped and under-performing in schools that have good students and teachers. And educational technology should be designed by educators, not corporations, politicians, lobbies, mass media…

Values are acquired: doctrine and dogma are imposed.

Self organizing system

Self organizing systems structure themselves without any intervention from outside the system (e.g. John Conway’s Game of Life). Is it possible to set some kind of self-organizing system whose output is an educational system? The Kalkaji experiment: a computer fixed on a wall, and, without instructions, children learnt how to browse (by essay an error) and did browse and teach each other how to.

The Madantusi experiment: will English stop them from using the computer? with enough time, the kids learnt how to play games with the computer and asked for more power and better pointing devices… and saw English not as a barrier but as a challenge: “if I learn English, I’ll be able to use the computer better”. Assertiveness, not negative statements.

Evolution of the experiments

But, are these projects replicable? sustainable? adaptable to different contexts? Can really emerge educational systems from such experiences?

The pattern was: discover the use of the computer, discover browsing… and, systematically, discover Google and see the whole experience shifting towards a higher level.

Next step: install a software to learn English, based on voice recognition. No instructions provided. Again, with few time children were using all the features of the system.

But more than computer literacy, other things were happening.

SOLE: Self Organised Learning Environments

Groups of children interacting with groups of computers. No timetables, no instructions. They are able to find solutions to problems given. Questions being: is this learning? How far can this go (e.g. learn Quantum Mechanics)?

What about the teacher? Is the teacher just presence? Is the teacher guidance? Experiment: put the teacher in a screen (videoconference) with webcams communicating in both directions (teacher-classroom). It’s interactive, and somehow present.

Some conclusions: Education for development

Development is about reducing inequalities. And engagement, and effort, is worth it if the reward (reducing the personal distance with the rest) is big. If there is no reward (inequalities are relatively small), effort does not pay off, and thus engaging in learning is a tough thing to do. How to fight this lack of commitment, or vision, toward one’s own education?

Some conclusions

• Groups of children can learn to use computers, irrespective of who or where they are.
• Children share a computer and get literate in 3 months: learn by doing, but also learn by watching.
• $0.03 per child and day
• Computers improve maths and English (even biotechnology)
• Improve school attendance
• Anwer school leaving examination questions
• Reduce petty crime
• Generate local goodwill
• Change social values
• Children in unsupervised groups can self organise to do all these things, and teach themselves English (speaking and pronunciation too) or improve algebra

Can they change their own aspirations? Can they achieve their own schooling?

Q & A

Paul West: Can such a method be mainstreamed in any way? A: It can be done. Examples and evidence are more convincing than good words.

Q: Can it be applied with adults? A: Adult ego is a strong inhibitor and it might probably not work.

Emma Kiselyova: Can we use second hand hardware to replicate this kind of experiences at a broad scale? A: Children are enraged if they do not get the appropriate (cutting edge) technology. So, the answer is: let’s keep the old computers for us, as we are less power demanding, and send the new ones, as the kids do need more powerful features.

Q: Would this work with retarded or autistic children? A: Autistic children are brilliant, but lack the social skills, a clue of success of these experiences. And brilliant as they are, they might end up going on their own.

Ismael Peña-López: if kids are now so exposed to abundance of information, and learn to collaborate and learn together with other students, are they going to become different adults? A: Definitely. Some youngsters are already collaborating in most intensive ways and even challenging their workspaces and ways their jobs are managed or structured. Surely the nature itself of Education has to change because the reality has dramatically changed. Because full generations are chaning.

Francisco Lupiáñez: Besides remoteness, GDP per capita, or health conditions, do they affect too? Beyond a threshold (i.e. 200miles from the urban center), all these variables are homogeneous in rural India, while remoteness still suffers a gradient in relationship to performance.

Larry Nelson: What’s next after getting the skills? What’s the teacher role? A: After skills, games come. Then, Google opened a large gate of knowledge, really useful for homework. And it was on an imitation basis: the one that takes advantage of using Google to do schoolwork, is imitated by the others not to lag behind. Teachers end up encouraging this kind of behaviour: forbidding gaming is breaking the whole emerging learning process. And there are astonishing stories about kids leaving schools, having smashing success at high school, and attributing it to the computer experience.

Q: Are there any filters in the Internet access? A: Not even there are no filters at all, but even the default set links by the users were overridden from start. And public exposure avoids vandalism, criminal or socially unaccepted browsing. And as the computer is so needed by the students, they will not risk losing access to it.

Notes from the UOC UNESCO Chair in e-Learning Fifth International Seminar. Fighting the Digital Divide through Education.

Visual Literacy in the Age of the Big Picture
Susan E. Metros, University of Southern California

What does it mean to be literate?

Just reading and writing? The say that one image is more worth than a thousand words stands even more than ever. But there are many and many literacies: depending on the context, on the emitter, etc. the message does change.

Even many disciplines heavily rely on visual literacy: Maths (symbols), Art, Psychology (perception), Economics (chars and graphs), Geography (Cartography), Medicine, Communication (Semiotics)… Disciplines that have created whole theories around these visual literacies.

Visual literacy:

• Decode and interpret visuals
• Encode and compose meaningful visuals: making pictures is getting as important as looking at and understand pictures
• Informed critic of visual information: understand what’s good or bad
• Able to judge accuracy, validity, and worth: know what’s real and what’s not

Judging validity is one of the challenges we’re facing and which is posing many problems as is getting more complex, sensible, a matter of debate along time.

The big difference between being visually stimulated and being visually literate [an interesting statement regarding the digital natives issue]. The visual information overload plays with our perceptions (and specially with those of the younger ones)… but what about understanding, assimilating them? Is there a cognitive process or just sheer exposure?

Failure to communicate is not inherent in the piece of information to be transmitted, but in the design of the communication device. So, where’s the balance between amateur and authentic? Is there a trade-off between “freedom of expression” and appropriate, authentic, sense-making visual communication?

And besides understanding the vocabulary of visual communication, fluency is also required: not only to be able to understand, create, create with sense, but create and communicate with ease.

Becoming visually literate

It depends on your learning style: a behavioural preference (visual), a matter of a better processing of things (auditory), a way of concentrating better (kinesthetic)… Statistically, 65% of the population is visual. Which means that not only visual communication is pervasive, but that it is preferred by the majority of the population as a learning style.

But visual literacy is also bound to the social and cultural context, sometimes making it local some visual signs, sometimes making other signs universal, and more immediate than words.

There is a lot of code to be learnt — plain different from other codes like written text — that needs serious addressing and specific training.

The role of the visual

• To document, e.g. The War Tapes, and document it in many ways, from different perspectives, to send different messages based on the “same” reality.
• To validate
• To communicate, in a very quick, straightforward, universal way
• To inform
• To engage, e.g. in gaming.
• To expose, to bring to light and spread information that, otherwise, would be difficult or impossible to transmit
• To politicize
• To provoke

Affecting change

How to make people more visually literate? How to fight the visual literacy divide?

“Come to us”: build spaces for this purpose. The problem being that people want their own spaces, their own tools. OSU Digital Union just does thus: create a space people feel as theirs.

Woven into the curriculum: try and make visual literacy an embedded part of a bigger whole (e.g. USC Institute for Multimedia Literacy). Research and teaching on how to do things an do it a must.

Systemic change: A Global Imperative. The Report of the 21st Century Literacy Summit: develop a strategic research agenda, raise awareness, make tools for creating and experiencing new media, empower teachers, work as a community.

Q & A

Mara Hancock: how do we face the white space, how do we leave room for the sight to rest? A: It’s really important to teach students about white space, how not to exhaust the available space and let one’s sight breathe, and avoid vision overload. There is indeed white space in many other literacies.

Q: Images can lies. Sometimes the image does not correspond to an object, but to what this object represents. This has to be taught too.

Brian Lamb: How to be rigorous, how to contextualize? A: It’s all about being literate, but not only the emitter, but also the receiver so they can enforce the appropriate use of visual communication.

Q: How to fight the visual illiteracy of students? A: Is there such a thing as visual illiteracy? To be able to read you have to be literate; to be able to listen to music or see images, even if understanding can be rough, you still have the ability to hear and see. Which means that addressing this (partial) illiteracy might not be that hard.

Teemu Leinonen: Can design-thinking help to improve visual (and all other) literacies? Should design-thinking be a part of the visual literacy programme? A: Design competences might help to enhance digital literacy, but are not inherent to visual literacy. About design-thinking, don’t believe there is such a thing as design-thinking, but going back to humans or humanities, and ask ourselves why are we doing some things, etc. E.g. Ethics should not be an attribute of design-thinking, but of being human in general.

Q: ICT literacy is very difficult to integrate in primary school. Can visual literacy can make its way in elementary and secondary education? How can it be integrated into the curriculum? Or will it stay on its own? How does it relate with digital and ICT literacy? A: Kids already are making use of their visual and digital skills… outside the school. It is “just” a matter to bring these competences — and experiences — inside the curriculum, bring them inside the classes and guess how to do it. But it is already happening.

Javier Nó: In art, image is imposed; in design, image should be negotiated. It is not a matter of literacy, but of meaning. Designers often forget that design is not art and that there is an audience to be reached, so image should be negotiated with the users, engaging them in the debate of image use. A: Art, and design, is important to learn it in context. And lateral thinking plays an important role in this context learning. Decoding and encoding go hand in hand, and we have to be able to do both.

Ismael Peña-López: Are digital natives wired different? Have we to realize this and adapt? Or are they just over-stimulate and just need to “calm them down” in a visual, digital way? A: Even if everyone is using the same tools, the thing is that students are using them in other ways and they do have different skills or capabilities. Cut them wings would be a step backwards. Sometimes they are more engaged than we think of and, more important, the boundary between formal and informal environments are blurring. We should take advantage of this.

twin towers falling
a mother with a child
capa and abatted partisan

Notes from the UOC UNESCO Chair in e-Learning Fifth International Seminar. Fighting the Digital Divide through Education.

Wikiversity
Teemu Leinonen, Media Lab – University of Art and Design Helsinki

Any true understanding is dialogic in nature (Bakhtin).

UNESCO’s Young Digital Creators: UNESCO Young Digital Creators (YDC) Educator’s Kit.

Evolution of learning technologies

Is it learning with technology or learning from technology?

The best way to predict the future is to invent it, Alan Kay, 1971.

An evolution of instructional technology:

• The media center as a separate artifact, segregated from the gallery, meeting room and seminar room.
• The web becomes more and more the desktop, the meeting and collaborating place.
• Pervasiveness of mobile phones brings on the possibility of mobile learning, that has to cohabit with e-learning as we knew it.
• Affordability of multimedia devices that can record, create or edit sound, audio, etc. enrich e-learning experiences with rich media created by the user. This leads us to projects as the mobile audio encyclopaedia.
• Then to augmented reality with mobile phones like Shedlight.

Wikiversity

Course: Composing free and open online educational resources: a course planned (and paid by) Finnish students, but followed by +60 more people around the world. And now it can be (and it actually is) replicated elsewhere, at any time.

The syllabus, the assignments… everything took place on the Wikiversity page of the course.

Wiki platforms allow the collaborative creation of very simple — though effective — learning objects.

Three metaphors of learning

• Knowledge acquisition: you read a book, you learn. But access to courseware is not an issue when it is abundant. Learning is an individual cognitive process. Memorizing.
• Participation: learning is a socio-cultural process. Acting.
• Knowledge creation: learning is a socio-cultural process with an intention to produce artefacts. Cultivating.

In Wikipedia all three metaphors take place. But where’s the place for educators? What and how are they doing?

Grundtvig’s Folkenhøjskole: the university is more than four walls, it is a social dialogue. Freire: non-institutional education. Ollman: the University as an institution that is educating and nurturing acting people, but that has built a chasm between it and the society. Hakkarainen: Progressive Inquiry [reminds me of Participatory Action Research].

Q & A

Paul West: how to maintain, validate wikis? Does it leave room for the teacher? How digitally literate do they have to be? A: Le Mill makes it easier for the teacher to create content.

Q: is it really possible to have cultural diversity in wikis/wikipedias? A: Actually, the different structures themselves of the several wikipedias do demonstrate that even at the core, cultural differences shape the container itself, not only the content.

Tim Unwin: Are artefacts content? are we focussing too much on artefacts rather than content? A: Of course the artefact is but a tool. But the process of creating, even creating the artefact, does provide too some valuable knowledge, as it forces reflecting about the process itself.

Susan Metros: How can teachers assess the materials that students are creating, specially in collaborative ways? A: It is important to keep groups really small so that tracking can be easily done.

Julià Minguillón: the pervasiveness of English as lingua franca, won’t crowd out other smaller languages? Should this small languages speakers be encouraged to create content? A: ICTs enable small languages to survive, but translating content in other languages is not the strategy: it has to be genuine created content.

Sugata Mitra: what is learning? when students “play” with computers, is that learning? A: It might be learning, but after the n repetition, is just repetition. Besides, learning and education might not be the same thing,

Ismael Peña-López: If the whole process is available, and everyone can join, how can we assess the learning of the student? how can we help them find whether they learned or not? A: Some of them might not be interested in a “formal” assessment, but just find the process was interesting. We could be talking about evaluation and feedback instead of assessment. Tim Unwin: peer assessment is a very effective — and even efficient — assessment method.

Linda Roberts: What’s next? A: Free Open Content should gain power. And a community will gather around the creation, sharing and use of these materials, enhanced by collaborative tools to engage one with each other.

Brian Lamb: How to evaluate collaborative work? A: The evaluation should also be like a dynamic dialogue. Of course, it requires time (and money).

Enric Senabre: How to create a local Wikiversity? A: Content has to be created, prove that “people will come”, and then the Foundation will create the local Wikiversity site.