Ismael Peña-López, lecturer and researcher
Information Society, Digital Divide, ICT4D
“Learning is best understood as an interaction among practitioners, rather than a process in which a producer provides knowledge to a consumer”
in an interview to Etienne Wenger by Seth Kahan, found in ECCOP.
Couldn’t agree more with this quote.
What is understood doesn’t need to be discussed.
:)
I think of the potential online volunteer as the eternal excluded from cooperation for development, as a kind of “market” yet to be discovered.
When I say “eternal excluded” I dont’ mean he or she never took part in any project or organization in the field of cooperation for development, he surely did. What I mean is that he surely had to abandon because of other (most important) social commitments.
Lets take three main factors: age, time and space.
Age factor
There’re four main age groups in volunteering:
0 to 16: too young to have a real engagement with anything. Can be a volunteer, but yet too immature to carry the weight of real responsibilities
16 to 25: quite an adult. Can carry on with volunteering responsibilities and, most important: (usually) has plenty of time to “waste” with others, as he is normally an student or apprentice and has not a lot of other responsibilities
25-65: married or with formal engagement; sons or family duties; work, work and more work. Not a lot of time to spend with others, specially time to “give away”. Would volunteer, but how and when? What a pity: he’s got training and he’s got experience. He’s got knowledge but a difficult way to share it with others. The potential online volunteer?
65-over: he’s got plenty of time and a lot of experience. He’s surely the new cluster of (“real”) volunteering and, why not, virtual volunteering. But he’d maybe prefer personal contact. Besides, it’s possible his experience is a little bit out of date if he did not keep a long life learning/training in his expertise field.
It seems to me that groups 2 and 4 make up the normal “real” volunteers while the third group is the natural virtual volunteer.
Time factor
Having familiar responsibilities shortens our disposal of time.
Having professional responsibilities shortens our disposal of time.
Our preferred NGO is open when at work.
When home, no time to volunteer because it’s time to be with his or her children, couple, do some housework, etc.
And when he or she, at last, can spare some time to volunteer, where to? Whom with?
Space factor
Same happens with the question “where to volunteer” in the preceding example.
But there are other reasons besides family and work not to be able to go where you can volunteer: crossing the ocean or the continent is, besides a matter of time, a matter of money. And sometimes it is even a matter of infrastructures: no road, no trip.
Adding up:
[This is part of what I said at the First International Congress about E-Learning and social inclusion. I’ll try and gather all up and put it in the form of an article. In the meanwhile, I’ll publish it as a normal post by little pieces :P ]
I don’t like to spend lots of time writing about blogging because I feel the same way than watching some TV show dealing about some TV series: endogamic. The unique occasions I talk about the tool I use (and not its use) is to track down all the setup stuff: to get back where I got lost and to shine some light on someone coming behind.
All this digression is to introduce two people I’ve met by looking at my logs. Someone got here through Technorati and, well, I couldn’t help to “technorate” ICTlogy and found two (new) people linking me. Wow! They made my day!
One of the reasons I made this blog up was to get in touch with other people with similar interests, but this is becoming quite a hard thing to do. Finding people quoting me or considering me a Key EduBlogger makes me think I’m not alone and there’s people I can learn from.
Thanks Josephine and thanks Yan for being there and showing up :)))
Back from holidays, and after the divertimento of my last post, I’m done with some reading and, via Octeto, I blog I come to like more and more, I discover something made at home.
The Click Corner “is a freeware application for the development of multimedia educational activities. With Clic you can create different types of activities: puzzles, associations, crosswords, identification activities, exploration, written answer, multiple choice…”
In fact, it is not e-learning, but “only” computer assisted learning. Who cares: it has everything I look for to be published in ICTlogy. It’s non-profit, is co-operative and is ICT driven learning. Whether is it though up for Catalan primary or secondary schools or not, it can be (re)used for whatever other uses, as “the Clic corner intends to be a web space of co-operation and solidarity between educators and schools through the exchange of the applications produced using the program”.
More info about the site at elearningeuropa.info.
On Thursday 15th April I’m speaking at the First International Congress about E-Learning and social inclusion
My communication will be 30 minutes long within the framework of Thursday afternoon (15.45-17.15) session II: Problem solving methodology for e-learning. Ain’t no complete communications programme yet: promise to publish at once when noticed.
Though I’m still thinking on what I exactly want to say, my mental scheme is as follows:
Theoretical Framework
Practical case: e-Learning for e-Inclusion
A three pieces puzzle:
Main characteristics of online volunteering centered e-learning projects:
Can I set up a project like this?
On Monday I attended the International Workshop “Social perspective of e-Learning and Development in the Information Era”, organized by the UNESCO Chair in e-Learning of the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya
Here come the notes I took:
Mónica G. Luque. Organization of American States.
American vision of the social perspective of e-learning in higher education
e-Learning brings a new concept: learning management. It might not seem new, but it actually is. In presencial learning there’s no learning to manage as everything is in the lecturer’s head: content, the syllabus of the course, students’ feedback, etc.
She quoted Humberto Maturana and his term “lenguajear” (languagize), which is a way of emphasizing the dynamic relational character of language: the definition of terminology, policies, real incorporation of terms and actions, etc. is the path we’re on right now in e-learning, we’re just languagizing e-learning more than learning its language.
Some links she gave:
And the four “distances” that e-Learning helps to save:
Tapio Varis. University of Tampere.
Social perspective of e-learning in national education systems.
Quote: “you cannot look at the University if you don’t look at the educational system as a whole”
Ramiro Wahrhafitg. Universidad Electrónica del Paraná.
Social perspective of e-learning in Brasil’s higher education system.
Quote: “e-Learning is a borderless education”
I think this was already true in distance education, but e-learning has overwhelmingly updated the concept.
David Casacuberta. Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.
E-Learning and social inclusion in the spanish higher education framework.
3 main activity lines in e-development:
Amartya Sen (Nobel Prize in Economics), in his book Development as Freedom, makes the difference amongst “functions” and “capacities”, i.e., send e-mails or organize a flashmob by using e-mails
We’re used to think in functions but we’d rather shift to capacities: there’s a need of empowerment of ICT
This lack of education in capacities makes it more difficult to accept new technologies, motivation, etc.: “what’s in it for me?” (note to self: I think this is quite related to the success in our online volunteering programme, in the side of the e-volunteer and in the side of the people and organizations receiving e-volunteers).
Marco Antonio Rodrígues Gies. United Nations University.
Social perspective of e-learning in the University: a UNESCO’s vision.
Quote: “we have to control intangible goods: education, culture, environment, etc.”
Quote: “education is often dealed as a commodity, but it is too related to a country’s culture or social reality to deal with it under such a concept only”
