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.

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

Opening
Mariana Patru, UNESCO

The importance of Education in all stages of development.

The increasing changes that the Information Society and Globalization are bringing impact all aspects of life. Life long learning is one of the paradigmatic effects of the recent changes the World’s been in.

Beyond digital literacy, and digital exclusion because of lack of physical access, there’s a huge knowledge divide that needs to be fought: access to useful, culturally relevant knowledge.

ICT4D as a tool to fight the digital divide
Tim Unwin, Royal Holloway University of London and World Economic Forum’s Partnerships for Education programme with UNESCO.

Fight the digital divide or build on individual strengths? Begin with information and communication needs, being the fundamental part “for Development”.

Partnerships

ICT4D partnerships have been very successful: they have been fostered per se, but also the private sector has had a leading role in ICT4D, in contrast with a lack of understanding among donor agencies. On the other hand, partnerships have worked well because ICT4D is still a complex an unknown area where collaboration is strongly needed.

But partnerships have also failed: partnerships with no clear goals or even meaning; focus on public-private partnerships, forgetting other kinds of organization; emphasis on the supply side; insufficient attention paid to partnership processes.

Sustainability is not something that can be thought of once the project is started — or near its “completion” — but should be included in the plan from the sheer beginning. Same with scale, trying to avoid pilot-project fever that think short run and narrow scope.

e-Learning for development?

The pros are many and quite well known. What are the cons?

• Costs of ICT are high, and infrastructures scarce.
• Tutorial support is required and more important than just content — though important too and needs to be localized indeed.
• The focus should not be put in ICT training, or “office” software, but in Education. Education vs. training.

Main reasons of failure in ICT-led education projects in Africa

• Understand context of delivery
• Appreciate African interests
• Overcome infrastructure issues
• Provide relevant content
• Top down
• Suypply driven
• Photo-opportunity “development”

Constructivism and 21st century skills

Learners involved, democratic environment, student centred learning, etc.

Critiques to constructivism:

• learning might be behaviourally active, but is not necessarily cognitively active.
• may not be delivered in teaching practices. Teaching practice mayh not deliver the theoretical realities
• Ignores the reality of the African classroom
• Emphasis on replicating “truths”
• Modular thinking
• Going for the easy option, e.g. go to the Wikipedia
• Tendency towards plagiarism
• Inability to think critically
• Lowest common denominator attitude
• Pandering to student “demand”

Most of ICT in education focusses on content and collaborative networking, but not in problem solving or critical thinking.

What kind of education for what kind of development?

Private sector and education. Engaged in setting a global agenda, and with strong interest in the knowledge economy.

Hegemonic model — economic growth and liberal democracy — need for focus on relative poverty — inequalities, access.

Emphasis on training for a knowledge economy while forgetting about critical ability and reflection.

Education is not a driver for economic growth. Key skills to be human, fighting the digital tyranny that constrains us rather than liberate us. Some ICTs (e.g. e-mail) do not let time enough to think creatively and take action.

Take control of technologies — and take control of those who control the technologies — to take control of our learning process. Re-define the role of the teacher and re-assert shared and communal educational agendas, while assuring equitable access.

Questions or opportunities for the future

• Post-constructivism and the role of the teacher?
• Processes of learning communities?
• Enabling innovative problem solving and critical thinking?
• How to provide appropriate infrastructure?
• The tyranny of digital environments?

Q & A

Linda Roberts: is there any good practice in ICT4D and Education? A: Sadly enough, there are very few of them, e.g. some of them mobile-phone centred that enable the student to access some content without displacing the teacher.

Eduardo Toulouse: is it the clue teachers and the quality of teachers? what happens when infrastructure is a barrier for even the teachers? A: Yes, the clue is teacher quality. And to achieve this teachers have to be able to live on their own work. And, in some environments, thinking that they are going to engage in the production of materials and share them (at the connectivity cost) for nothing is ludicrous.

[...] from University of South Africa: is there any option left but believe in ICTs, despite all the drawbacks, “buts”, failures and so? A: Top-down approaches do not work, so this “hope” in ICTs has to be indeed grassroots founded.

Ismael Peña-López: what if we do not have teachers? can ICTs help to bring them on our community? can open educational resources help attract teachers? can OER help to create teachers out of the blue? A: OER can leverage already existing social structures to create learning communities. Peer learning, by leveraging peers and turning them into teachers can be a thrilling option. Communal education is the one to be put under the spotlight, and even a local facilitator can even be a bridge between a remote teacher and the community if the tools and the human network are well thread one with the other.

Q: What’s after post-constructivism? What about critical pedagogy? A: Isn’t this a Western approach as well? Even if Paolo Freire is brazilian, his ideas are well rooted in the West.

Paul West: ICTs can help the teacher to lighten his burden by making him more efficient, e.g. when correcting and marking exams. A: Agree. The debate is in whether doing old things in a new way vs. or new things the old way.

Sugata Mitra: is there a possibility for real change? for a shift of paradigm? A: We have to find the gaps and expand them.

Ismael Peña-López: is there a room for co-operation that avoids cultural imperialism, fosters endogenous development, relies on content while not forgetting the teacher, etc.? A: The critique is not in collaboration or in technology, but on pre-established mindsets, one-size-fits-all or magic solutions, etc. Of course collaboration can take place, but to define a solution, not just implement the solution.

Linda Roberts: how to engage the youngest? A: Mass media might be a first approach to get to them easily.

Teemu Leinonen: what’s the role of languages related to education, ICTs and development? A: There are several initiatives where ICTs are being used to support languages that are dying out. On the other hand, localization is not (just) translation into the local language.

Fourth and last session at the Open EdTech Summit. Conclusions, in the shape of “plus” and “idealistic” ideas, are presented.

Personalization of the Learning Process

• Two kinds of personalization: what is taught, and how is it taught.
• Concerns about converging processes (e.g. Bologna), acreditation and control frameworks, etc.
• Build new models instead of change current ones, by trying to make obsolete the latter. Find spaces of subversion.
• One space for subversion is assessment, trying to make ends meet with freedom of choice.
• Extreme importance of capacity building, letting the student to localize their own decisions.
• Automated personalization as suggestions, not as compulsory roads to follow, and led by the teacher, not by the technology.
• Microcredits as the smallest unbundled parts of a larger course, so they can be “rebundled” into other courses according to needs and competences to be acquired.
• Opennes a requisite for tailoring and personalization, enabling cost reduction, remixing itself, etc.
• Collaboration is enhanced (if not just enabled) by openness, but personalization can play havoc on social activities: beware.

Learning Content Development and Delivery

• Content as infrastructure, thus OER has to go beyond content and enter into meaning creation.
• Content is not static: it has a source but evolves multi-directionally.
• New roles shaped by the new landscape: teachers and institutions become guides, enablers, capacity builders.
• Cultural shift: from the notion of controlling knowledge towards an open environment.
• Superiority of open content for reuse and reproduction, but as it is not static, the concept of preservation is at stake and needs redefinition.
• OERs should provide context-sensitive output formats: open distribution.
• Open quality assurance: not only open content creators, but also curators.
• Rethink copyright and fair use.

Future Technologies at the Service of Learning

• We need open, interoperable tools and services, no more corporate driven, pre-packaged, specific tools.
• The World is an LMS: knowledge is anywhere and we have to know how to find and retrieve it.
• Access is a right: free broadband (or really affordable), free content.
• Technology has to enhance the joy of learning (not make it a nightmare).
• The success of FLOSS communities should be replicated in OER.
• New assessment models that capture the personalization of learning. The community might be able to accredit the learner.
• Content will come to the learner in a personalized way.
• Usability: make the interface invisible.
• Help (and give credit to) the process of the teachers’ using technology and acquiring digital capabilities.
• Education has to radically change according to the disruption that the Internet represents.

Learning: Everyone, Everywhere and Anytime

• uLearning: ubiquitous learning as the new model.
• Long life learning requires adaptability of the system.
• Knowledge does not go out of date, just becomes more complex.
• Connections more important than the nodes.
• Self organized learning, through mash-up curricula, user generated content, communities of practice and learners, within personal learning environments.
• Ubiquitous and persistent classrooms for continuous (and informal) learning.
• Universal recognition of levels and certificates.
• Accrediting institutions internationally.
• Context and progress aware of digital scaffolding.
• Recognition of prior and experiential learning.
• Limit the cultural imperialism of technology and learning design: one size does not fit all
• Free access for all
• Encourage respect and understanding through learning.

Third session — and second teamwork session — at the Open EdTech Summit. This second teamwork session focuses in converging the ideas of the brainstorming session and try and come up with 5 “plus” ideas and 5 “idealistic” ideas.

(reprise and gather up from the previous session)

Focus on mentoring as the added value in the learning process

Microcredit structures, besides personalization, allow the evaluator and the evaluate to be different entities. Right now the system is self-referential, as the output is evaluated by the same one that facilitated the inputs.

Education institutions could split in three different institutions: the ones that provide content, the ones that provide guidance and the ones that provide certification.

The added value is in mentoring, not in content. So we should concentrate in mentoring. And open content and open technology to support it play a crucial role in this part.

And quality also has to do in this scheme of things: we have to go open to reach high quality standards.

From teaching to learning

The “bolonization” (convergence) of educational systems, shifting responsibility to the student, and putting more stress on learning rather than on teaching. Focus also in capacity and competences. If just e.g. 25% was standarized or compulsory, that will leave plenty of room for personalization within assessment.

Capacity building

On the competences side: empower people to do things.

On the choice side: allow people to do their choices.

Learner motivation

How to engage the student: personalization would actually be a good way to keep students engaged.

Quality

Quality assurance systems that foster innovation, or testing innovation in quality assessments, act as a bottle neck as normally do not include technology in their evaluation system. Their assessment map is closed. How much space for subversion, for innovation, can we find.

Empowering teachers

Make lower design statements to that the learning materials can be acted upon, that feedback from experience can be adapted and sent back to the material or the lecture.

(for “plus” ideas and “idealistic” ideas, please see next session)

Teamwork at the Open EdTech Summit. First part is a brainwriting exercise where a personal reflection time should produce a list of ideas. Then, a brainstorming exercise with the rest of the group where ideas are put in common. This group is about Personalization of the Learning Process. Other groups are Learning Content Development and Delivery, Future Technologies at the Service of Learning, Learning: Everyone, Everywhere and Anytime.

Team 1 – PLP (Personalization of the Learning Process). Contents of this area: individual methods of learning, personal learning speed. student personal learning experience, interaction between learning processes and technology.

Brainwriting

How far can we go with personalization in a credential-driven education system?

• As far as we push the learning process away from teaching, shifting responsibility to the student, the process can be as personalized as at the individual level.
• Goal setting and assessment has to be homogeneous in a higher degree (with slight changes according to personal needs), education has not.
• ICTs lower the transaction costs of individual/personal mentorship
• ICTs lower the costs of content diffusion (open educational resources in digital format)

How far can we go in automatically adapting the student’s personal learning experience, based on the system’s assessment of their knowledge/understanding?

• Syllabuses can be highly dynamic, though they require some human and technological effort
• Again, assessment should take place at the final stage, evaluating the “output” of the educational process. The process itself… should it be assessed (per se, not in terms of evaluating its performance to achieve educational goals)?

Will it be possible in the very next future that each student rules completely her/his learning process?

• The student should be able to rule their learning process
• More effort — and resources — should be put on the how and the what for, not the what
• The focus should be goal setting, designing “default” paths according to more common profiles, and guidance

How far technologies will help us in adapting the personal rhythm of learning to the academic demands of the universities?

• Should universities have academic demands at all? Shouldn’t universities be the ones to adapt their rhythms to personal learning demands?
• If focus is not put in the process but in goal setting, guidance and assessment — not in teaching — then technology could help to bind people together while keeping the ends quite loose.

Is it possible to offer university contents completely adapted to a specific (individual) learning process?

• It absolutely is: we don’t have to make scarce something abundant (e.g. tight syllabuses)
• The goal is not filtering, but capaciting people to filter

Brainstorming

Larry Johnson: how do you guide someone through their random process so that they become an e.g. “engineer”?

Jutta Treviranus: Personalization can be understood as personalization of access, not necessarily (or not only) personalization of the content. It’s critical to identify what constitutes an “engineer”.

David Wiley: a credential is shortcut for the employer to identify competences, a bundle of competences. Can be unbundle these competences? Course selection, sequencing, etc. can be hence adapted.

Llorenç Valverde: still a tight curriculum in Spain even after the Bolonia process. Is there room for a freedom of choice?

Lev Gonick: how to create space for subversion? how to bring the student autonomy? not big changes: where are the cracks of the system?

Jutta Treviranus: optimising learning, making it challenging to the student.

Vijay Kukmar: we can go very far in personalization. Microcredits, e-portfolios… are already existing tools that can be drivers of change. Not thinking about disciplines, but transferable skills and learning how to learn.

Jutta Treviranus: how you best learn? personalization is not about the system itself, but the engagement.

Ismael Peña-López: now what’s scarce is not knowledge (that’s why we had to produce and put together the scarce knowledge in classrooms and universities), but mentoning: no more focus on knowledge, but on mentoring.

Claudio Dondi: It’s easy to identify what the core competences are in a specific discipline/degree/etc. Thus, competences should be certified competences, more than learnings. Move the assessment from knowledge only to know-how.

Llorenç Valverde: how to certify competences without assessing content?

David Wiley: what happens with social interaction (amongst students) if personalization goes to the limit of individualization? Personalization should not let aside social activities. How to find the balance between helping in the decision-taking and taking the decision for the students.

Elena Barberà: personalization of what? goals? processes? technologies? We have to identify where are we learning, where are the connections between the person and knowledge, and adapt the use of the tools to this: learning needs evidence, documentation.

Francesc Santanach: personalization will be crucial in the future where heterogeneous students will meet in the same classroom. Globalization and digital technologies foster this heterogeneity. It is more important to recommend, not force anyone into any path.

Larry Johnson: there is a deep lack of definition about what is personalization, how to… There is not such a defined niche for personalization, and technology will not make it out of the blue.

Jutta Treviranus: personalization and technology not only from a pedagogical approach, but also in other aspects just like (physical) access.

Vijay Kumar: the difference between information and education; and between education and formal education (certification, etc.); and between education and learning. Should we focus in how learners customize their learning experience and forget about education?

Lev Gonick: how do institutions avoid the irrelevance of “bad” learning practices?

Llorenç Valverde: personalization has not to be contaminated by the commoditization that came with the industrial revolution. But we can avoid the pret-à-porter one-size-fits-all of education and go into personalized tailoring.

Lev Gonick: we have to set up theories that create new frameworks that e.g. allow the human genome project to emerge.Without that theory, educational institutions will be marginalized from their own system.

David Wiley: theory has to be backed up with real data.

Jutta Treviranus: and we need a framework to gather all theories.

Claudio Dondi: there is a problem when trying to put under the same system training (professional training) and education. The higher education system is not actually coherent with the rest of the socio-economic system. Thus, something should be done at the system level: the problem might not (only) be at the praxis level, but at a more systemic one.

Vijay Kumar: what is the atomic unit of personalization: is adaptation or is it individualization? The currency between the academic system and the socioeconomic system is the degree. Is the problem this currency? the different interests at either side of the currency exchange?

Larry Johnson: the very most importance of competences as the real currency, not certification.

David Wiley: competences permit tying the content, to experience, to certification…

Lev Gonick: we created a personalization at the technological level, but not at the educational process level.

Claudio Dondi: Difference of personalization between how and what.

Larry Johnson: there has to be a mentor-like connection in personalization. The system is educational, not technological.

David Wiley: personalization of the mediation, personalization of the feedback you give, personalization of the hint, etc.

Lev Gonick: how to use the technology to personalize to achieve higher success, to prepare the student for success?

Vijay Kumar: metacognition, where I know how to access problems and where to look for help or solutions. Seeking information, validating information, etc.

David Wiley: prior knowledge is a basic, stable difference between students.

Ismael Peña-López: not only identifying how to access problems, not only assessing one’s assets or prior knowledge, but be able to identify and assess your own context, culture, environment… your localization. These three issues — the cognitive process, prior knowledge and context — might be three main drivers of personalization.

Claudio Dondi: the difference between prior knowledge and the capacity of learning.

Vijay Kukmar: how to shift from content-centered processes towards learning-to-learn processes?

Elena Barberà: we are looking forward more autonomous learners, to enable them to take responsible and adequate decisions at the correct time. Autonomous thinking might be one of the big answers to the whole debate.

David Wiley: personalization as Amazon. Amazon only asks you to buy books, no conscientious or rational or meditated choice required: just buy. And the system can tell the tastes and needs and suggestions.

Jutta Treviranus: what are the limits of personalization? don’t we have to let the system open? We cannot allow ourselves to reinforce individual biases.

Person is all alone, big distance to cover, all learning is contextual, take the route to the future… by walking, the first step is down, it’s lonely on the mountain top, breathing is learning, room for serendipity.

I am at the Open EdTech Summit where very interesting people from the world of Education and instructional technology have gathered to share best practices, as the basis for discussions to help identify future education and technology needs and trends for next-generation educational and learning environments.

Opening Up Education
Vijay Kumar, MIT

A departure point of the session is Toru Iiyoshi & Vijay Kumar’s book Opening Up Education (2008), which gathers experiences on open education around the World (and can be freely downloaded at the book’s site).

Some issues: what does open education mean for the future of institutions? how can it be made financially sustainable? how can it work as an agency for change in both formal and informal education? how can niche learning communities take advantage of open educational resources?

Three axes: Open Technology, Open Content, Open Knowledge.

Recommendations:

• Investigate the transformative potential and ecological transitions: does open education helps in finding solutions to the structural or traditional problems of education? can quality be scaled to reach wide national needs? what’s the role and design of blended learning? how can we throw down the boundaries of education?
• Change Education’s culture and policy: fight inertial frames (e.g. “scarcity of knowledge/content”), enabling structures, how can open education help to improve access to and quality of education? are we ready for that much openness? what arrangements have to be made in institutions and educators to benefit from openness?

Susan D’Antoni, UNESCO IIEP

Not only universities: but education as a whole, universal primary education, gender equity.

The Horizon Report 2008 states some crucial aspects: the needed change of scope and leadership in research topics related to education (and open education); the importance of mobile devices for mobile learning; the emphasis on collaborative learning that demands new forms of interaction and assessment; new literacies that education has to bring into curricula.

Experience shows that communities of interest are useful for:

• awareness raising and identifiying who the leaders to be informed are
• spreading knowledge and capacity bulding
• guarantee quality and serve as a reputation device for both content and people

Paul G. West, Commonwealth of Learning

The “openness” process has to be smooth and progressive, and same applies to the process of “blendification” or “e-learningification” of Education, specially in those communities where the digital divide is more than a tag (physical access, broadband, affordability…).

In this sense, it is important to see that the sharing will not be one-way sharing (from developed to developing countries) but a two-way sharing. And this requires a change of mindset in developed countries institutions and people.

We need to think on whole-world terms, and beyond the interests of closed groups. And, on the other hand, on the different perspectives and approaches of the many and many kinds of people and communities around the World. And this takes us back again to the digital divide issue.

Linda G. Roberts, Curriki

There’s always been innovators, innovators that are necessary to break with the way things have normally been done and try and find new ways of doing them… or of doing new things the old way. Normally, doing different is the most difficult way.

Clayton M. ChristensenDisrupting Class: work from outside the system, break it. Linda G. Roberts: we should work both from inside and outside the system.

After breaking barriers, after bringing innovations into the spotlight, sustainability is the issue. Innovation requires new strategies. If (methodologically successful) innovations are not here to stay, because they are not sustainable at all, should we engage in the effort of making them up?

Sustainability is also about political or strategical sustainability. Thus, the correct questions have to be put — and given an answer — so that the whole thing makes sense for each and everyone.

Of course, sustainability is not only about taking into account costs, or investment, but also in how this investment is going to cut down final costs of alternatives to the innovation (i.e. the traditional way), in this case, open educational resources.

Llorenç Valverde, Open University of Catalonia

We shouldn’t talk about teaching, but about learning — and this is specially important in open or distance education institutions.

If content is open, the container should be open too.

And, as a matter of fact, if content has any value, it does not make any sense to close it to “protect or investment”, because, sooner or later, someone will open it for us.

On November 5th, 2008, I attended the V Encuentro de e-Inclusión [V e-Inclusion Conference], a meeting of telecenter administrators from all around Spain organized by Fundación Esplai.

If last year’s edition looked at the Web 2.0 as something new — I imparted then a seminar entitled What do they say the Social Web is? —, this year’s general belief was that not only the Web 2.0 is here to stay but that it’s impact on the way the Internet is used and on how communities go online has altered the whole landscape. Thus, telecenters should reflect on their own activity and, above all, their own role in this new participatory web. The session debated around three main questions, put down below.

The paragraphs that follow freely report the opening session of the Encuentro, featuring three conferences, Q & A to the conferences, two showcases and, lastly, some personal reflections on the whole session.

Telecenters 2.0 and community building
Ismael Peña-López (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya)

More information:

• From Social Networks to Virtual Communities of Practice. Beyond e-Inclusion through Digital Literacy (I): the Case of the Crafting Community, where a proper framework and explanation is given to the slides above
• Download slides and citation indications in English and Spanish

Training in ICTs and community building
Ricard Faura (Generalitat de Catalunya)

Telecenters achieving maturity: extensive geographical presence and intensively enhanced by new social technologies, the threat being long-term sustainability, both at the economical level and the conceptual (i.e. is there still a need for telecenters?).

1.- The evolution of the telecentre towards v2.0 and community building: utopy or reality?

The telecenter has to work in a network of telecenters, working and collaborating together.

The telecenter as a living lab: a place where tools are put at the citizen disposal, so that the citizenry can innovate, can take part in innovation.

The telecenter has to train and empower the citizen to benefit from social networks, by taking part in the community.

2.- How to build community through digital literacy?

Find and engage the social connector, the person that has to be activated to trigger a multiplicator effect.

3.- Challenges of community building from social initiatives?

Once the first milestones of an inclusion project have been reached, the public sector has to step aside and let the civil society lead. Community leaders - “shakers” - have to be the ones that drive inclusion projects.

Centros comunitarios de aprendizaje
Ernesto Benavides (Tecnológico de Monterrey)

1.- The evolution of the telecentre towards v2.0 and community building: utopy or reality?

Reality, not utopy: the Tec de Monterrey has 33 campuses, 37 campuses + 25 corporate universities in the Universidad TecMilenio framework, a virtual university present in 17 countries and the Instituto para el desarrollo sostenible with 26 social incubators and 1709 Learning Community Centers. Comunity building can thus be understood at many and different levels, the important thing being to act at al levels and in a networked way, sharing principles and resources, and adapting the procedures to the target population.

2.- How to build community through digital literacy?

Engagement is the answer. Let people take part into the whole deployment of projects, from design to evaluation.

Planting solid roots and setting a slow (but steady) path, with easy to reach milestones that report small successes.

3.- Challenges of community building from social initiatives?

Impact in the civil society:

• infrastructures are a must, but not enough
• open software and content are the next required step, but not enough
• empowerment: the telecenter as a window to generate identity and build community

Impact in public policies: try and keep long run strategies (despite of political changes) and try and bring grassroots initiatives into macro policies.

Centros comunitarios de aprendizaje:

• cut down poverty and marginalization throug social inclusion
• bring alternatives of access to education, information and communication
• promote productive projects for a sustainable community development

Q & A

Cesk Gasulla: Facebook is really successful, but is it useful for community building?

Ismael Peña-López: Facebook has been perfect to get people together, and there are plenty of interesting uses of Facebook, but it lacks the possibility (or makes it really difficult) to draw guidelines, schedules, milestones and goals or, in other words, to design, manage and implement a project, as it is difficult to separate one community from another, or different interests, as they live together under the same roof. There is too much “noise” in Facebook to engage in a quiet conversation led by an engaged coordinator without the danger of passerbys peeping inside the project. Probably, Ning is the answer to this need of a closed room for community building. Indeed, as Ning requires more effort to be set up and customized than i.e. an event or group on Facebook, it might probably be taken more seriously by their own promoters, that will commit more as they’d be expecting a return of their higher investment (of time, resources, etc.)

Ricard Faura: while agreeing with the former, we should not forget that Facebook’s main success has been popularizing and making easy to understand what social networking sites are, how do they work, etc. And this is something that other platforms have been having toughest and longest time to achieve.

RedPizarra.org
María Eugenia Moreno (COGNOTEC (Red TIC Bolivia))

In Bolivia telcenters are (often) located inside schools so that they can supply the techonolgycal training that schools do (or can) not. Telecenters are also place in rural areas in order to provide access to these remote areas.

Two main areas of speciality of telecenters in Bolivia:

• education: digital literacy, formal and long-life learning. Portals, community wikis where to upload any kind of content.
• agriculture: e-commerce, etc.

How can web 2.0 contribute to telecenter development and community development? What’s the utility of social networking sites?

Arci
Milvia Rastrelli (Arci)

How to find the usefulness of ICTs, as a means, not as a goal?

Work with the youth, that have found clear uses of ICTs, in community building though these ICTs in the way they use them. By attracting youngsters with ICT applications that they are asking for (e.g. music sharing, video editing and publishing, etc.), next step (inclusion) comes naturally (or, at least, easily).

Work with immigrants, that again have mastered some ICT applications (e.g. radioweb) for their own benefit. But this has provided free information and in plural ways and approaches. Telecenters promote these actions to foster democracy, information, etc.

One of the most urgent needs for a telecenter is to identify who the dinamizator will be… and engage them in doing it.

Some reflections

I pick one of Cesk Gasulla’s quotes as the summary of the whole session: We should quit dynamizing technology, and dynamize people instead.

The reflections telecenters are making these days — and the Encuentro not only featured direct representatives form circa 200 telecenters in Spain, but somehow reflected also the philosophy of the whole Telecenter.org network, which gathers thousands of them — are not about setting up some guidelines for the nearest future to come, but reflecting on the essence itself of the role and even need of the telecenter. This reflection is threefold:

• Is there still a need for such a thing as a telecenter, when technology is made more affordable every day, and access is being incorporated in public policies at all political levels?
• If yes, what is the role of the telecenter: does it still has to supply access to infrastructures? should it shift towards digital literacy and capacity building? should it instead switch towards community building and focus on the personal and social networks?
• If yes, how should this be done? and what’s the role of technology in the whole (new) landscape?

There was quite a consensus that access is no more the primary goal of telecenters (though it still is a very important goal in many and many places around the globe).

And there was quite an acknowledgement that capacity building is neither the primary goal. Firstly, because the new 2.0 tools have made things easier to learn and build things on the Internet. Secondly, because there are several examples where newly digitally literate people saw no changes at all in their lives. What’s the purpose, then, in being digitally literate?

So it seems that, besides access and capacity building (remember: no one said it was not a need), telecenters should now focus on community building. There’s increasing evidence that after a first geeky wave of early adopters, the Internet is empowering already settled communities, strengthening their ties and broadening their scope and reach. The Internet has become a catalyst and multiplier of the social inclusion goodnesses of the community, the social and “real” network.

But, being a network as it is (made out of connected individual nodes), the only way to help the individual to weave their own network (offline and online… and back offline again) is being a part of the network too. No hierarchies, no top-down approaches will work for the telecenters to approach the community networks, but their own and sheer participation in them.

This is were the Telecenter 2.0 comes to place: how to be part of the network, speaking their own language, engaging in a conversation; how to find and trigger the community leaders; how to approach the excluded and get them inside the conversation, the network, the community. This is the real challenge of the Telecenter (2.0): the switch from a public service to being another citizen, another neighbour.

The Knowledge Society demands that we leapfrog ahead in our education systems, build a new digital literacy, and improve soft skills (creativity, innovation, collaboration, communication, and critical thinking, among others) that could help all 21st century citizens become productive, effective knowledge workers. Educators, policymakers, business leaders, parents, and youth must identify and develop new sets of e-skills and e-competencies to help youth succeed, and build a capacity for success toward the 22nd century.

This is the framework in which the e-Competencies conference will take place on October 31, 2008. Taking place in Mexico DF and organized by FLACSO-México, University of Minnesota and University of Toronto, the purpose of the conference is to identify, project and discuss the e-skills and e-competencies required for success in the 21^st and early 22^nd centuries.

I am one of the speakers at that conference and I’m presenting a brief reflection — Tuning personal competencies to the Information Society — on how the Information Society is changing our landscape and how should we be adapting our own competences according that change. Here are the materials I will be using:

Slides in English

Slides in Spanish

More information

• Slides download and citation instructions
• Official site (English)
• Official site (Spanish)
• Attend the conference online (English)
• Attend the conference online (Spanish)
• Videos of the conference (accepted communications)
• Conference channel on Twitter

(Continuation from: From Social Networks to Virtual Communities of Practice. Beyond e-Inclusion through Digital Literacy (I): the Case of the Crafting Community)

In a seminar on Tuesday 21st October 2008 — ICTs, development and e-government 2.0: empowering the citizenry — I extended the case of the crafting community and compared it to several civil society actions closely related to e-government, mainly projects led by MySociety.org, but also others about political campaigning, or Health and Education.

Some of those examples came from existing communities, or ended up in the creation or communities that built around interests in common.

The Case of the Catalan e-Justice Community

Compartim [let's share] is a grassroots-born initiative now led by the Justice Department of the Government of Catalonia (the Spanish region whose capital is Barcelona). It’s aim is to share knowledge, by promoting learning by practice sharing. It’s original promoters and target — now spread to the whole Department — were public servants working in the Justice system in Catalonia (professionals from different specialized branches directly dealing with the public: psychologists, lawyers, criminologists, mediators, trainers…) that needed and wanted to share questions and doubts, procedures, solutions… everything that could make their works easier and to provide a better service to the citizen.

The already existing (explicit, though informally though the hierarchies) community, went online and created a blog to keep the community informed, built several communities of practice at the Justice Portal where interaction would take place (the portal includes also “official” blogs closely related to the activity on the portal) and engaged in a richest exchange of knowledge which, at the moment, has produced several main outcomes:

• an increase in the flow of information and knowledge within the Justice Department
• a higher implication of the community members, both in quality (more implication) and in quantity (more people involved)
• impact on the “real” lives and works of the community members
• reaching consensus on key issues at the practical level (no hierarchies involved, no power stresses implied)
• articulation of the real community, the one that exists “offline”

After the grassroots stage, now the Compartim Programme has been institutionalized — in a perfect shift from a push to pull strategy — and communities of practice are but a part of the institution’s strategic plan and training plan.

e-Justice: opening the Administration to the citizen

But, does the community of the Justice system ends with the public servants? Should it include the citizens?

Hence, the Compartim Programme goes open and is inviting the whole community and citizenry to debate about knowledge management in the framework of the Catalan Justice system in their III Jornada del programa Compartim [III Compartim Open Conference]. As in the case of the crafting community, what is important is the real community, made up of real people with real life goals. The Internet is enhancing the debate by:

• Keeping the Gestió del Coneixement - Programa Compartim del Departament de Justícia blog as the nodal meeting point
• Using a digg-like social blog to discuss, ex ante, possible topics for the conference and their relevance

The goal of the Conference is to reflect about the community itself with two workshops:

1. Ideas to improve communities of practice.
2. Using Internet tools for knowledge management.

The conference will take place on 4th December 2008, which means that the online preparation of the event will take place during the preceding 10 weeks of the meeting.

It is my opinion that this is a perfect public-private partnership to improve the Justice system specifically and e-Government and e-Administration in general. The difference being that the private counterpart is not, as usual, a firm, but each and every citizen acting in their own interest.

More information about the programme and the event (in Spanish or Catalan)

• Redes horizontales, CoPs en nuestro entorno: Compartim
• Compartim. Gestió del coneixement

In a conference on Friday 24th October 2008 — Accesibilidad e Inclusión Digital:el papel de la Alfabetización Digital — I used the crafting community as a flagship of a community or network enhanced and empowered to a higher level by the Internet at large and by Web 2.0 applications specifically.

Marc Botella kindly suggested that I made clear the reasons for choosing such a community, so to avoid falling into stereotypes about crafting in particular and women in general. I hadn’t even thought about this: the online crafting community is so rich that, only if you do not know it, could you be thinking on stereotypes. Though, just because not everybody knows it, I agree with Marc that some explanation might be due.

Main characteristics of the online crafting community:

• Solid existing “real world” community.
• Long tradition of learning by doing.
• Long tradition of sharing among peers. It is a institutionless and hierarchyless community.
• Shops, workshops and coffee shops are a meeting point rather than a place where to make businesses.
• Broad range of socio-economic, education profiles and age (i.e. very far from the “bored housewife” topic).
• Non-geek and usually low-tech profile. In any case, technology is definitely not a goal, or something you discuss, but a tool and something to forget about. But,
• Intensive and broad use of a wide range of applications, most of them web 2.0 and/or cloud applications.
• Expert use of rich media production, edition and diffusion tools: rich text, photography, audio, video…
• Use of social networking sites and social networking tools in other sites to strengthen community links.
• Use of social networking site not as an alternate world or community — in opposition to the offline world — but as an extension of the existing communities and networks.
• Use of social networking sites to enlarge the community, and benefit from the low transaction costs of communicating through the Internet to build a critical mass of minority interests (the “long tail”), be it to buy and sell or just to exchange knowledge and practices.

Summing up: a very heterogeneous community that gathers around a common interest (crafting), and intensively uses technology to deal about this interest, proving a high and practical digital literacy level, which normally comes not from a technical background.

A second derivative is that digital literacy and virtual community building act as a driver against exclusion — because of the stress in networking — and for e-inclusion — because of the intensive use of ICTs.

NOTE: definitions and statements come from direct observation. An accurate research should be performed so to statistically validate their significance. Sincerest gratitude goes to Mercè Guillén who led me by the hand into the world of “e-crafting”.

(Continued: From Social Networks to Virtual Communities of Practice. Beyond e-Inclusion through Digital Literacy (II): the Case of the Catalan e-Justice Community)