By Ismael Peña-López (@ictlogist), 16 July 2009
Main categories: Digital Literacy, e-Government, e-Administration, Politics, Meetings, Participation, Engagement, Use, Activism
Other tags: competencias_digitales_cuimpb_2009, goverati
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Notes from the course Competencias digitales: conocimientos, habilidades y actitudes para la Sociedad Red (Digital competences: Knowledge, skills and attitudes for the Network Society), organized by the CUIMPB, and held in Barcelona, Spain, on July 16th and 17h, 2009. More notes on this event: competencias_digitales_cuimpb_2009.
New competencies for politics, government and participation
Ismael Peña-López
Q&A
Carolina Velasco: one of the problems with cyberactivism is creating buzz around some concepts or information or pieces of news that are not fully understood by who’s endorsing them. A: Agreed. Indeed, the fact is that there’s people that are highly technologically literate and master several tools, but lack other dimensions of digital literacy such as informational literacy or e-awareness, for instance, and have the ability to endorse but without a critical point of view.
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Course on Digital Competences (2009)
By Ismael Peña-López (@ictlogist), 16 July 2009
Main categories: Digital Literacy, Meetings
Other tags: competencias_digitales_cuimpb_2009, jose_manuel_perez_tornero, media_literacy
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Notes from the course Competencias digitales: conocimientos, habilidades y actitudes para la Sociedad Red (Digital competences: Knowledge, skills and attitudes for the Network Society), organized by the CUIMPB, and held in Barcelona, Spain, on July 16th and 17h, 2009. More notes on this event: competencias_digitales_cuimpb_2009.
How do we face investing in digital competences when we are not even investing in education at large?
In general, we practice a contextual hypocrisy
, where, depending on the topic or the context, we ask for more and more transparent information, or we just forget about the piece of news. Same happens quite often at the educational level: we ask for more implication of politicians on Education, on ICTs and Education, etc. but we forget, for instance, what happens at the reading (as in reading books) level. And the impact is a chain of events: reading is related with the content industry, and the content industry with the e-content industry. We need a broader and, specially, much deeper scope and vision of things.
Though there actually is a social media production, the entertainment industry is still very powerful as is the gaming industry. In Spain, notwithstanding, both industries are quite small. This has to be taken into account when designing e.g. policies for e-content: is there content? is it produced in the local economy? how important is the content local industry?
This is not (only) a technological change, but a cultural, a linguistic, a social one.
Forecast: DTT as a gate towards the convergence of platforms, ending up with the Internet diffusing all content and thus requiring special digital competences.
In the last 30 years there has been an evolution towards introducing media literacy — or media education — in the syllabuses of formal education. That was a need so that youngsters could understand the culture they are living in.
Many things we’re seeing on the Internet is a replication of the informal education we’ve given our kids, based on the lack of privacy that (a) the consumption society and (b) the surveillance-based political system
require.
One of the main goals of Media Literacy should be encouraging a critical, participatory attitude toward the media. And also try and bridge the divide between the educational system and the labour market, the productive economy, the industry, as increasingly it is culture and society that are shaped by Economics and not the other way round.
There is an urgent need to find media literacy indicators. And these indicators should be used to measure media literacy projects that should be based on some strategies and action lines: definition and context of actions, public awareness, cultural change, etc.
New paradigms, like media literacy, have to be accompanied by technical changes, semiotic changes, new ideologies and an organized socialization.
Components of media literacy:
- Media education
- Participation and active citizenship
- Critical and creative abilities and skills
As important as having good language skills, it is important to have a critical attitude towards that language, to know grammar, to reflect about it, as it is the only way that this language could be used strategically.
Strategic goals
- Develop a media literacy policy
- Link media literacy with technological and economic innovation
- Boost creativity as an essential part of media literacy
- Promote media literacy as an instrument of active citizenship
- Reinforce research and education in media literacy
These strategies have to be accompanied by innovation at all levels.
Expected results:
- feel comfortable with existing media
- active use of media
- use media creatively
- have a critical approach to media
- understand the economy of media
- be aware of copyright
Two dimensions of Media Literacy:
- Skills: use, understanding, communicate
- Environment: availability, media education
Q&A
Emilio Quintana: is there a different degree of competitiveness in Italy than in Spain? A: In terms of property of media, the sector is more concentrated in Italy than in Spain. Emilio Quinana: yes, but the debate about this concentration is higher in Italy than in Spain.
Q: How will the European Commission regulate the media market? Based on protection? based on freedom? A: It is usual to see artificial dychotomies in the debate about media: freedom vs. censorship, protection vs. closure, free software vs. patents, etc. The EU tries to regulate on a self-regulation basis (which does not work) and co-regulation basis: self-regulation enforced ex-post. A better way to regulate, nevertheless, is raising awareness amongst the population of how media works, so that people can understand what they’re seeing.
Q: how do we invest in human capital in media literacy issues? can we trigger change? A: The only possibility to trigger change is to be analytical and critical about the state of the question.
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Course on Digital Competences (2009)
By Ismael Peña-López (@ictlogist), 16 July 2009
Main categories: Digital Literacy, Meetings
Other tags: boris_mir, competencias_digitales_cuimpb_2009
4 Comments »
Notes from the course Competencias digitales: conocimientos, habilidades y actitudes para la Sociedad Red (Digital competences: Knowledge, skills and attitudes for the Network Society), organized by the CUIMPB, and held in Barcelona, Spain, on July 16th and 17h, 2009. More notes on this event: competencias_digitales_cuimpb_2009.
The digital competence as a methodological competence
Boris Mir
Boris Mir begins with a description of the Catalan Education system, stating some main characteristics:
- High ratio of students per teacher, which doesn’t allow for much personalization
- High rate of drop outs as we move up the educational system (K-12, high school, college…)
- High decentralization that does not allow for homogeneous methodologies state wide
- High dependence of the political cycle, meaning that every four years, the educational system can be redesigned from scratch by the new government, breaking any kind of long-term strategy
Competences
We do not have a syllabus designed towards competences, but towards disciplines. And it is within these disciplines that competences are to be developed.
These generic competences are eight: communicational competences, methodological competences, personal competences, and living-with-the-others competences. Within the methodological competences we find “Information treatment and digital competence”. The problem is: whose reponsibility is developing those competences? In an educational system centred on the discipline, whom are the generic competences?
Digital Competence
The digital competence is the combination of knowledge and skills, along with values and attitudes, to achieve goals with efficacy and efficiency in digital contexts and with digital tools
. It is interesting to note that the acquisition of knowledge is accompanied by skills, being the main difference that skills can be trained (while knowledge cannot). What’s the difference then between an expert and a competent? Digital competence is reached in the strategic use of different skills in several spheres of action which lead to their respective dimensions of the digital competence:
- Sphere of learning: learn and generate knowledge
- Sphere of information: Retrieve, evaluate and manage information
- Sphere of communication: how we relate with others, communicate, etc. in digital environments
- Sphere of digital culture and digital citizenship: civic behaviour, political participation, security, etc.
- Sphere of technology: use and manage technological devices — not the first sphere, not the only one, but one in five
At what point we decide what and when we have to do a web search, or scan a document, or send an e-mail? This is the strategic application of the digital competence, this is what is to be learnt, it’s not easy to, but it’s really fundamental (and this has little to do with when one was born).
State of the question
Few teachers use technology in their work, and the ones that do, they use it to support the traditional teaching practices. Students do alike: support the traditional learning practices, sometimes enhanced or improved by their own digital knowledge, but similar to teachers. Summing up: no methodological changes, no changes of educational goals, no changes of syllabuses.
In general, the computer at home is used for leisure and introduced quite often in the household to “do homework”, though a huge majority agrees that “using the computer” will be a needed requisite in the nearer future.
A Road map?
Possibilities in Education will be:
- In 1 year: Collaborative environments, online communication tools
- In 2-3 years: Mobile devices, cloud computing
- In 4-5 years: Smart objects, personal portal
But, will these potentialities become true? Are we aware of them and their relationship with education? Can we foster them if we do not use or even do not understand them? Are we, at the Education system, going the same path the society goes? e.g. are we banning mobiles in classrooms but dreaming of mobile learning?
What should we do?
- Raise awareness on a broader conception of ICTs, fostering its methodological and competence-related dimensions;
- Find out why ICTs have had little impact or low adoption levels in Education and act in consequence;
- Lead systemic educational changes: it’s not a matter of ITs or technology, but a matter of education and pedagogy and methodology.
Q&A
Q: how do we make the teachers not to be afraid of technology? A: They are not! Students and teachers use intensively the technology for their own personal purposes. But they have their own idea of what a school is, and technology does not fit there. So, it’s not a matter of fear, but a matter of mindsets. The main indicator of success at school is the familiar framework; and the main indicator of educational use of technology is, again, household usage: the digital divide is a knowledge divide, not an access divide.
Joan Carles Torres: We are finding the anti-educational use of ICTs when applied in an old-fashioned way, where the results are worse than without technology. A: Agreed. It’s a matter of change management. It’s better to use the technology that is already socialized; then you can focus on pedagogy and not on technology.
Carolina Velasco: Isn’t it a problem that students are way more tech-savvy that their teachers? A: Agreed, but we should not overstate the digital competence of the students. Yes, they use a lot of technology, but in a very narrow field.
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Course on Digital Competences (2009)
By Ismael Peña-López (@ictlogist), 09 June 2009
Main categories: Cyberlaw, governance, rights, Digital Divide, Digital Literacy, e-Readiness, Information Society, Participation, Engagement, Use, Activism
Other tags: i2tic, jordi_graells, marta_continente, sessions_web
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On Wednesday 10th June 2009, I’m giving a conference at the Centre d’Estudis Jurídics i Formació Especialitzada, Justice Department of the Government of Catalonia (Spain). It is framed in the Web Sessions series to debate about the changes and impacts of the Information Society. My conference is called Darwin a la societat de la informació: adaptació (i beneficis) o extinció (Darwin at the Information Society: adaptation (and benefits) or extinction).
As the presentation shows, the speech is made up of four parts or general ideas:
- The industrial era — or the industrial economy — is based (among many other things) on two main issues: scarcity and transaction costs. These two limitations have shaped the world as we know it, especially institutions: schools, parties and governments, firms, civic associations… When shifting towards a knowledge based economy, both issues of scarcity and transaction costs fall down into pieces. Will institutions, and intermediation in general, follow?
- Second part is an overview on some of these institutions, and how their models and, sometimes, their sheer survival is threatened by these radical changes on costs and scarcity. Some will violently disappear, some will just fade, some will suffer adaptations along the following years. All in all, it’s about the risk of exclusion from society — not digital exclusion —, the risk of becoming worthless.
- Thus, there might be a need for new (digital) competences to face the present and the nearest future. These competences (to be acquired both by individuals and institutions) will be necessary to interact with each other and rebuild how we learn, work, or engage in politics or everyday life.
- To foster the acquisition of these competences some policies to foster the Information Society will have to be put to work, and the role of the government seems to be a crucial one
I will conclude that it all is a matter of bringing on changes while making sense of them.
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I want to heartily thank Jordi Graells for giving me the excuse — actually, to push me — to sit down and put together some ideas that had been rambling on my mind for some time. The title is his and it was great inspiration that helped me in weaving those ideas together. Not surprisingly, his work with the Catalan e-Justice Community (Compartim) is a most inspiring one too.
By Ismael Peña-López (@ictlogist), 14 May 2009
Main categories: Digital Literacy, Meetings
Other tags: competencias_digitales_cuimpb_2009, crossmedia, Digital Literacy, e-awareness, e-competences, e-skills, media literacy, multimedia
2 Comments »
The reflection around digital competences that I drafted in Towards a comprehensive definition of digital skills has evolved into the course Competencias digitales: conocimientos, habilidades y actitudes para la Sociedad Red (Digital competences: Knowledge, skills and attitudes for the Network Society), a joint project with RocaSalvatella — especially with Olga Herrero and Genís Roca — who are doing an most valuable work in raising awareness and building capacity in the private and public sectors on e-competences.
The general idea of the course is as follows:
The Information Society implies numerous changes at all levels in our daily life: how we access and exchange information, how we work and stablish cooperation relationships, or how we communicate and interact with individuals and institutions.
These changes have as a consequence new demands for the individual: learning, being a professional or being a citizen in the XXIst century requires some competences qualitatively different from the ones taken for granted just a decade ago. The Information Society requires new knowledge, new skills and, especially, new attitudes that can be grouped under the denomination of digital competence.
“Digital competences. Knowledge, skills and attitudes for the Network Society” will bring access to the most recent approaches to the concept of digital competence according to different social dimensions, including a set of practical experiences of development, application and evaluation of these competences in several spheres of society.
Putting together the course has been an incredible effort because we really wanted to place it in between “Using MS Word to write a job application” and “New competences for the upcoming millennium in a post-structural and post-modern world under the light of the approach of the Habermasian interpretation of McLuhan”.
That said, we convinced — our sincerest gratitude — Cristóbal Cobo, Boris Mir, José Manuel Pérez Tornero, Ismael Peña-López (this one was easy to convince), Howard Rheingold, Joan Torrent, Telefónica I+D (speaker TBC), Laura Rosillo and Gerard Vélez to speak theory and practice of digital literacy from several points of view: education, government, enterprise and civic action.
The aim of the course is to reflect about digital skills and competences, but also to be able to apply that reflection in our daily lives, be it at the personal or at the professional level.
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By Ismael Peña-López (@ictlogist), 12 May 2009
Main categories: Development, Digital Divide, Digital Literacy, ICT4D, Meetings
Other tags: apc, chat_garcia_ramilo, gem, gender, gender_evaluation_methodology
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Live notes at the research seminar Gender Evaluation for Social Change by Chat Garcia Ramilo, Coordinator of the Association for Progressive Communications Women’s Networking Support Programme, Manila (Philippines). Internet Interdisciplinary Institute, Castelldefels (Barcelona), Spain, May 12th, 2009.
Gender Evaluation for Social Change
Chat Garcia Ramilo
Why gender evaluation? Evidence showed that ICT4D did not integrate gender considerations, though evidence also shows that effectiveness and impact of development projects increases if gender is integrated in design, planning and evaluation.
Based on participatory action research.
- Testing and development of a gender evaluation tool for ICT4D projects: teleworking, ICT training projects, telecenters, etc.
- Capacity building in gender evaluation: telecenters, rural ICT projects, ICT policy processes and localization (of content)
Findings and challenges
- a gap in capacity for analysis and evaluation of gender-based inequalities
- weak focus on gender in project design, implementatoin and policy formulation
- how to develop evaluative thinking about gender and ICT4D, and use it to shape new gender practices within the ICT4D sector? how to make it in a participatory action research framework?
How gender makes a difference in ICT4D and access to the Information Society:
- Comparative access to infrastructures by women and men are determined by income levels
- Capacity affected by literacy and education levels
- Services affected by relevance of service, mobility, safety issues
- Governance affected by opportunities for participation in policy processes
These aspects have to be taken into consideration if one is to design an ICT4D project in a specific place. The design of this project will sensibly be different depending on how gender is affecting the former issues.
But gender is not only about “women issues”, but also about social and cultural variables, how do the interplay of these variables impact on women and men.
The Pallitathya model
The Pallitathya help line Blangladesh center is a help desk service which consists in five basic components:
- local content
- multiple channels of information and knowledge sharing
- intermediation or infomediation, human interface between information and knowledge-base
- ownership
- mobilisation and marketing
This project’s desing helped women with specific queries (related to gender) or with lower literacy rates to reach a knowledge that, had the ICt4D project been designed in a different way, they would most probably have missed.
Philippine Community e-Centers
Telecenters in peri-urban areas. Though in absolute terms there were not much difference in usage rates amongst women and men, difference could be seen in how the telecenters were used and what values they assigned to them. For instance, women used the telecenters as ways to meet people, as ways to socialize. There were also differences in patterns of access and utilization in relation to age, education and income.
Fantsuam’s Zittnet Service — Nigeria’s first Community Wireless Network
To increase female uptake of the Internet, especially in rural areas.
Coverage of signal was not the issue, but hardware and high costs of bandwidth. Still, even if coverage was good, women had to travel to the centers, and this was a barrier for uptake, as also was low literacy levels.
Maybe it’s not about a wireless network, but embedding this project into a wider one aimed to reduce poverty by supporting rural female farmers. Besides, there is a clear preference towards voice communication over written, and SMS over the Internet.
SOS SMS
In distressful situations, women can send an SMS that is received by 5 institutions. Besides reporting of harassment and direct action by the authorities, these messages can be aggregated and thus infer patterns and profiles where harassment and distress are more likely to happen.
Why ICT4D (for women)?
- ICTs can provide access to resources and contribution to income, knowledge, etc.
- Indirect impact of ICT4D and access to income, knowledge, education, etc. on self-confidence and self-esteem. ICT4Ds have an impact on empowerment, in changing relationships, in agency.
- Emergence of new roles (of women).
- Changes in relationships
Why gender evaluation in ICT4D?
- Evidence of change in gender roles and relations can be used for more gender sensitive policies and programmes.
- Evaluations contribute to developing benchmarks and indicators for gender equality in ICT
- Developing capacity in gender evaluation (and gender planning) is a key contributing factor in mainstreaming gender in ICT for development
Q & A
Q: What’s the general procedure for such projects? A: There are mentors that capacitate evaluation facilitators through workshops, and then an evaluation plan is developed together with all the members of the partnership working on the project. Online spaces are created (e.g. with Ning) to support interaction and network creation.
Assumpció Guasch: It’s easier to work about gender evaluation if the promoters — especially governments — of ICT4D projects already have some gender awareness. Another issue is knowing the ICT Sector and the Industry, what’s the legal framework they’re facing. And it is also important knowing what are the technological issues that are crucial in these projects.
Q: How important is the role of capacity building? How is sustainability dealt with in gender projects? A: To be able to have some impact, capacity has to be built. As part of the capacity building strategy, handbooks and toolkits are built so that a certain levels of capacity and impact can be achieved quickly. Empowerment is, arguably, a measure of sustainability, as the more empowered the people the more self-replicable the model. But projects are not that easy to translate from one place to another.
Cecilia Castaño: Besides direct, action and empowerment, a gender focus has also some other derivatives: a sense of listening to “unheard” people, creating community and raising awareness about gender.
Comment: mobiles vs. Internet? People like Barry Wellman state that mobile phones help strengthening the strong ties (e.g. family), while the Internet helps broadening your network of weak ties.
Ismael Peña-López: can the Gender Evaluation Methodology be transposed to other collectives (e.g. immigrants, lower income collectives, etc.) so that to better design ICT4D projects? I guess that in gender-based projects there is a part that is strictly related to gender, but another part that deals with identifying and managing inequality and difference. Inasmuch there is a “managing the difference” issue, I wonder whether some gender-based projects could be just slightly adapted to identify and improve other projects aimed to bride other “differences”: educational, income, etc. Methodology, handbooks and toolkits, etc. could be then split in two parts: identifying, managing and evaluating the differential factor; and then focusing in the specific differential factor: gender, education, age, income, disabilities…
A: Gender is not only man vs. men but is much more complex: education, income, etc. So, it really makes sense to address the gender issue in itself. A gender approach does not mean that the project is focused towards the e-development of women, but just trying to include a new variable in the project. And there’s gender everywhere, so it maybe does not make a lot of sense thinking about “taking gender out” of the equation.
Assumpció Guasch: some projects in Extremadura (Spain) have tried to apply gender methodologies into e.g. age issues. The difference between gender and other issues is the pervasiveness of the former.
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