ICTlogy

Victòria Camps
How to educate in an audiovisual environment?

When looking at cyberspace, we have to avoid being apocalyptic or integrated (à la Umberto Eco). It is “just” a different way to get information, to communicate, to buy, to engage people (in politics), etc. So, we cannot moralize over a world that is deeply and quickly changing from the point of view of an ancient regime that is fading away. We have to try and be objective. And the question is: is the Network a progress? Always?

The Internet has made some physical characteristics (race, gender…) irrelevant for discourse, has desacralized the centres of wisdom and creation of knowledge, has decentralized (or shifted) the centres of knowledge. On the other hand, knowledge is increasingly vulnerable in the Information Society: being informed is not the same thing as knowing something.

The Internet has proven to be a revolution for political engagement, as it contributes in building community.

One of the most important rights in this new Internet-led age is the freedom of expression.

But every right of freedom has to have its limits, and the limits of freedom of expression are privacy and honour.

And what happens with the respect to one’s own privacy? That is, what happens when people do things on the Internet that they would never do offline. Are we losing intimacy? Is there a right to be forgotten?

Democracy can be deeply changed thanks to the Internet, but we need lots of good information so that we can decide on solid ground. But who certifies what is quality information? We need new professionals — or traditional professionals focussing on specific tasks — that filter and certify good information: journalists, teachers…

What happens with intellectual property? It is property as in the offline world.

On the Internet, we need self-regulation and self-regulation means education: formal education, education within the family.

Paula Sibilia, author of La intimidad como espectáculo
How social networks transform our intimacy?

We are living an age where our many technological devices — e.g. mobile phones — are pervasive and we “cannot live without them”, but this is happening because something had already happened, a change had already taken place decades ago. How is that we became “compatible” with our devices? Our ways of life accommodate to the devices, we made our lives compatible with our devices. And it’s both cause and consequence: we became compatible with our devices, but we built our devices because we aimed for a change.

During the modern era, and especially since the XIXth and XXth centuries, reading (especially fiction and novels) became a mainstream routine, and it was something that happened in silence and in isolation. Same happened when writing: both writing and reading was an intimate activity, something you did on your own. These activities required concentration, dedication. And even a specific place, a walled one — including schools.

This exercise of introspection was necessary to build one’s own subjectivity, one’s own identity, one’s own self. One’s own self compatible with the world that was being created since the Industrial revolution and all along the industrial era.

What changed in recent times?

We’re witnessing a shift from the intimate individual to the networked one. Which is changing the way to define our subjectivities, to deal with the world, to deal with others. We’re leaving behind the need of “a room of one’s own” (à la Virginia Woolf) for being and we’re moving towards a new paradigm of building one’s ego, one’s person, one’s subjectivity.

And this is of course radically changing education, we’re tearing down the walls we built for preserving our intimacy, much needed for building our selfs (¿Redes o paredes? La escuela en tiempos de dispersión).

Now, being visible, being online, being networked is the essence of time. And it shapes the essence of our own beings, our own self, our own identity and our own identity.

Our subjectivities are not alter-directed, instead of intro-directed or self-directed. We needed silence and intimacy, now we need crowds and openness. We were confined inside walls, we got rid of them, we became free… only to fall inside the network. Is that freedom? Is it not? It’s just different, much different indeed.

If we look at the school as a technology, the technology of a given age, the technology that we made compatible with a given age… it may now be the case that this technology, the school, if the age changed, it may well now be that the school became an incompatible technology for the new age.

So, it looks we got free, we unconfined ourselves. But. Can it be that the private sector could be capturing these free ones for their own profit? Could it be that the disclosure of the school is now being captured by the market? Is it possible that, in the quest for freedom we disclosed education for it to fall in the arms of private ownership?

We may agree that tearing down the walls of the school, disclosing education, is a much better scenario for knowledge to be created and transferred. But, instead, we may now need to create spaces for dialogue, for debate, for thoughtful exchange. We disclosed the spaces of knowledge, which is good, but we destroyed along the spaces for dialogue and debate, which is not.

Must we innovate in education? Why? What for? Are we experiencing a fad, where everything has to be innovative… also in the world of education? Or is it something more structural, even necessary?

Past January 10 and 11, the Institute of Education Sciences (ICE-UAB) and the Institute of Government and Public Policies (IGOP) organized the VIII Forum on Education. Innovation and networking. The forum began with a morning session to which I took part as a member of the Jaume Bofill Foundation. It was a seminar-like session to share reflections on what do we mean by innovation, how should organizations and people innovate and whether and why is innovation important.

The concept of innovation is fluid and elusive, and quite probably it is good that it is so: it is in the constellation of ways of understanding innovation and it is in the myriad of methods that we have designed as innovative that an ecosystem takes shape in order to encourage and enable an innovative attitude. An attitude based on questioning everything, on putting everything in doubt, on challenging the reality until it gives up in trying to provide an an answer… and then one needs to find some other answer: an innovation.

Why innovate?

A question, however, that ones does not usually put is why innovation, quite different to what for innovation. While the what for tells us where we head to (bringing into the debate also other questions like what and how), the why asks us about the reasons for innovation: we are so imbued with the innovation inertia that we assume that innovation is necessarily good. But, do we really need to innovate? When things are working fine (or even good), do we need to risk and spoil them following a desire for innovation at all costs?

There are probably two main reasons that push us to innovate. Recognizing them, rather than being a justification for ourselves, is also useful as they enable us to shape the kind of innovation that we will conduct. That is, to know why we innovate &mash; or why we should innovate &mash; will be crucial to identify, then, where to apply our innovative effort, where to create this ecosystem that can spark the whole thing, and most especially, what results are to be expected.

The first reason is improvement. We realize that things do not work or do not work well enough, or that they might work even better. And we innovate. Innovation, from this point of view, is not risky, it is incremental, probably leads to a natural evolution of what we are doing, we are not moving in known territory but we have maps that will guide us in the way. We copy, adapt, replace, reinterpret, patch. This is a proactive innovation that enables anticipation to our environment. And it is as necessary as the importance we award to being part of the avant-garde of a cultural field or and economic sector. In education, this type of innovation has historically been reserved for pioneers, the restless ones, even the misfits. With all the connotations — positive and negative — that carry these concepts.

Innovate to transform (oneself)

There is, however, a much more important reason (in my humble opinion) that pushes an innovative approach and it is transformation. Transformation is neither evolutionary nor incremental, but disruptive and often dichotomous: there is a before and an after in a transformating innovation. Transforming innovation usually comes, at its turn, because of two key issues: technological change (comprising as technology everything that is instrumental as tools, methods, protocols, etc.) and shifts of context.

Technological change usually implies, automatically, that the old technology becomes inefficient. That is, new ways of doing the same thing with less resources (again, broadly speaking about resources: people, material, financial, time!). And with inefficiency several tensions arise. Not only the usual restrictions and limitations are accentuated, but the costs of opportunity become unbearable as, especially, unbearable become the frictions between those who are now more efficient because they adopted the new technology and those who are still stuck in the old modus operandi.

The shift of context is even more dramatic, as it affects efficacy: when the context changes, goals also move. Without an adaptation to the new context, without innovation, all our efforts point now to a wrong target. If efficiency is to achieve as many goals as possible (regardless of the means, which are measured in the axis of efficiency), it becomes strictly necessary to innovate but not for improving, but precisely for things to not get worse, for us not to find ourselves like fish out of water.

Paradigm shift towards a knowledge society

At this point, let us grant ourselves a moment to take a distant approach. We are nowadays immersed in a vast socio-technological paradigm shift that is changing how we define and understand the foundations of our society. People and institutions of this society are watching in real time and with their own eyes how technology (efficiency) and context (efficacy) change quickly, inexorably and without turning back.

Before this(these) change(changes) we can, indeed, ask ourselves whether there is a need to innovate, or to improve anything. Or whether we should make evolve what we understand as the “educational system” or “educational institutions”. And these questions are perfectly legitimate.

But it is also legitimate to ask whether we should innovate not in a quest for improvement but just not to lose what we achieved. When we talk about equity in education, we talk about equity in a world where inequalities have shifted, where new inequalities have appeared, in new areas and environments. When we talk about quality, we talk about new skills that we did not even know, with unfound and undisclosed referents with which to compare ourselves. When we speak of excellence we do it in terms of resources and tools that have been replaced by a brand new toolbox.

Thus, it would seem that it is no longer legitimate but now urgent to consider an innovation that is transforming. Basically, because everything around us is changing and at a high speed.

Some weeks ago I was contacted by a doctoral student who is doing her dissertation on MOOCs. She was sending along a questionnaire on how to define and characterize MOOCs to which I had hard times to answer. The reason was not that the questions were specially difficult, but that the answers had very different mileage depending on whether you had in mind cMOOCs or xMOOCs. The feeling was not new: every time I read on the news something about MOOCs or have a conversation among colleagues on the topic, the difference (the huge differences) between the two models make any judgement difficult until some quite major clarifications are made.

As the questions from the doctoral student where appropriate, I thought I would take the chance, in answering them, to stress how cMOOCx differ from xMOOCs and, consequently, what a good idea would be to split up one model from the other one. My intention is far from aiming at coining a new term — there already exists even a taxonomy with 8 types of MOOC by Donald Clark — but reflecting on these differences and, in some way, extend the excellent work by Li Yuan, Stephen Powell and Bill Olivier at Beyond MOOCs: Sustainable Online Learning in Institutions.

Here, thus, comes the questionnaire and my answers:

A questionnaire about MOOCs

1. How would you define a MOOC?

It depends.

xMOOCs are self-learning courses supported by a minimum technological infrastructure for the distribution of learning materials and, sometimes, to enable a certain student-to-student interaction. In my opinion, most of them are not much more than that.

cMOOCs are self-learning communities, initiated by a person or a group of persons with knowledge and experience on a topic, and addressed to the rest of the community of interest so that new knowledge is built collectively with the support of decentralized leadership and the convergence of ideas.

2. What are the main characteristics of MOOCs?

It depends.

Most xMOOCs are just like an online course but without support or facilitation. Or are just a learning material with, sometimes, a platform for the exchange of opinions and judgements.

cMOOCs have a distributed leadership, they use totally decentralized technology and platforms, with a certain or minimum coordination (either methodological or technological) that, once it is established, usually steps aside and out of the front line of the learning action.

3. What would you consider are the benefits of MOOCs in comparison with other distance learning or e-learning modalities

It depends.

Most xMOOCs are, in my opinion, a step backwards (or, in the best scenario, just staying in the very same place) in relationship to other learning modalities. Only in very exceptional cases, and compared with very basic modalities, they suppose and advancement if they succeed in creating a dynamic and live learning community.

cMOOCs, in my opinion, are a leap forward. They imply putting the student in the centre of the learning action, make them aware and be part of the design and initiative of the learning action, make them reflect about that learning process and about the goals to be achieved (goals that, indeed, they are often changing). The MOOC makes reality the old motto of “learning to learn” as it makes real the creation of communities of learning and/or practice that, luckily, will stay with the learning for a long time (as long as their learning to learn lasts).

4. What would you consider are the main limitations of MOOCs?

It depends.

Most cMOOCs have as a main limitation the lack of facilitation, at least quality facilitation. Which, at its turn, implies other limitations that are the consequence of the former: highest drop out rates, disaffection, insecurity on the accomplishment of the learning goals, etc.

cMOOCs have as the main limitation that they usually take for granted that the learner masters three skills which are, the three of them, very demanding:

• A certain level (usually high) of knowledge on the topic to be dealt with.
• A certain digital competence, the higher the more decentralized is the course.
• A certain interest in matters of learning methodologies so that they can perform the implicit metaanalysis of a course of this kind.

If each and every one of these three factors is already excluding on its own, the confluence of the three of them is quite often an insurmountable barrier.

5. How do you think the main limitations of MOOCs could be addressed?

It depends.

Most xMOOCs, in my opinion, should evolve towards already established modalities which have proven their efficacy, with facilitators that guide the student and scaffold their learning process.

cMOOCs should do an effort to increase the granularity of the levels of decentralization, individualization, autonomy, digital competence, pedagogical reflection, etc. so that it is possible to design a gradation of MOOCs that go from less “cMOOC-intensive” (and, thus, closer to more traditional modalities) to more “cMOOC-intensive” levels or “pure-cMOOCs” to benefit from all the possibilities of the model. This granularity with surely imply a trade-off with the “purity” of the MOOC, either with more centralization, more scheduling, more support or facilitation to students, more technological pre-setting, etc.

6. What role do you think MOOCs have?

Now focussing only on cMOOCs (I guess it is now clear that I believe that xMOOCs are, in reality, self-learning without a course), in my opinion cMOOCs are the great excuse to rethink the increasingly more blurry frontier between formal education and informal, non-formal and autodidactic learning.

And, with it, to rethink the role of traditional educational institutions before the institutions whose mission is not educating, but that in whose performance they end up being excellent learning platforms themselves (firms, among others).

7. Please state the degree of agreement with the following statements ranging from totally disagree to totally agree:

(this question is being answered in relationship with cMOOCs, totally leaving xMOOCs aside).

8. Other considerations that you may want to add.

I consider essential, in any analysis about MOOCs, to split up cMOOCs from xMOOCs: they are too different to be treated altogether.

Regarding the question “Comptetences acquired and developed in the framework of a MOOC sould be evaluated” I do not think this question should be related to any modality of learning action in particular, but related to the purposes that led someone to develop and follow a specific learning action.

That is, the decision whether to evaluate lies, in my opinion, outside of the modality, and it is framed in the learner’s context, in the learning goals, in the need (or not) for a certification of such evaluation, etc. Thus, I think this is a question that “does not apply”.

Some last notes

The landscape of MOOCs is rapidly evolving. Their horizon is broadening as are the methodologies that lead their design and development… and the business models (or lack of) that lie behind them. Some of them are beginning to be more closed courses than open; some of them are beginning to stress on facilitation; some others on peer-evaluation; etc. By increasing, as I stated before, the granularity of their characteristics, also their types will vary and increase, depending on what characteristics one prioritizes in detriment of other ones.

Some of my statements above may thus be very inaccurate in the medium term for most MOOCs, be them xMOOCs or cMOOCs… as I am fully aware that they already are for some.

So, the important thing, to me, is the following one: if MOOCs are the answer, what was the question? I think that when trying to understand MOOCs it still is more important to identify the correct question rather than focussing on what MOOCs (all of them or some of them) can or cannot do or achieve.

School as a social innovation hub
Chairs: Eugeni Garcia, PhD in Economics of the Public Sector and expert in education and public management

Poverty is a vicious circle that reproduces inequalities: there is unequal access to most opportunities (e.g. education), there is unequal appropriation of these opportunities, and, thus, coming generations reproduce their status as they unequally benefit from those opportunities. How can the educational system break this vicious circle?

The value chain of education:

1. The student. At this stage, the family is the actor with a leading role.
2. Conditions of educability. Besides families too, public policies have a strong role here; the social third sector too, especially in the care and socio-educational fields.
3. Processes of teaching/learning, second opportunities: the school is of course the one with the leading role at this stage, but also public policies.
4. Educational success (or failure).

But how do we actually break this vicious circle of poverty and exclusion?

Anna Escobedo, professor at the Department of Sociology and Analysis of Organizations at the University of Barcelona.

What is the role of families. How are these families? How the change of families affect children and their educability?

The context in Spain is that the expenditure in families (or support to families) and education is below the average, and almost 50% of what other leading countries are spending in these areas.

The actual model of the family is two workers and two carers. Less children but more wanted. More negotiating and less authoritarian. Social polarization: couples are made up by people with similar educational levels.

There is a genuine concern or commitment with increasing the implication of the parents in education, in quality time, in dedicating more time to it. And ICTs are also having a significant impact in the education of children and the role of families. The relationship with the teaching staff has also changed.

So, more implication with education but total immersion in the job market is implying a huge difficulty to conciliate professional and family lives. Complementary services led by parent associations within the schools are proving to be a cornerstone for this conciliation: circa 70% of children use this kind of services.

Families — parents and children — should take more part in the making of decisions in the school.

Joan Badia, professor of secondary education and expert in innovation, teacher training and academic planning in higher education.

Schools should acknowledge that it has not all the answers to all problems and situations.

On the other hand, schools should realize too that many issues that do not strictly belong to the field of action of the school (e.g. the situation in the family), do actually have an impact on the activity led by the school. So, the belief that some issues “do not affect” the schools is plain wrong.

Of course, this acknowledgement and realization can only be achieved through a high degree of autonomy from schools, so that they can design their own strategies and actions.

There is a strong need to reinforce strategies that enable second chances.

Marta Caramés, leader of the Paidós Project at Càrites.

Paidós Project aims at providing support to families so they can break the vicious circle of poverty by enabling networks of families. It provides day-centres where families and children can spend time, be given advice on several topics related to education in general and on poverty in particular.

Most of the people benefiting form this project are people that almost the whole day are occupied on sustaining their daily lives: where will I sleep, what will I need. Thus, children do not have a “peaceful” environment where to grow healthy and be properly educated and be cared by.

If families do not understand that education is an investment, then education automatically becomes undersupplied. We have to make it possible that families can invest (time, resources) in their children’s education. To do this, we have to help them in their basic needs, so they can free time now devoted to these basic needs and spend it on their children’s education.

Discussion

Joan Badia: municipalities should have a major role in the planning of education, more decentralization should be enabled. There are three conditions for learning (from Ken Robinson): diversity, everyone learns differently; curiosity, learning driven by interest; creativity, provide spaces for creation. Different ways for learning within a context: service-learning, multistakeholder partnerships, etc. There is a gap between research and training: education in Spain seems to be lacking a liaison between the outcomes of research and their (non) introduction in training plans.

Anna Escobedo: parents associations and school councils should have deeper links and work closer. Participation and voting should go hand-in-hand. And we should not only focus on what is wrong, but on what is going well too, so it can inspire others.

Round table: New landscapes and new requirements for Education and their professionals.
Chairs: Jordi Collet, professor of the Departament of Pedagogy, Universitat de Vic.

Ismael Peña-López, professor of Public Policies for Development, UOC; Director of Open Innovation, Fundació Jaume Bofill.

Joan Subirats, professor of the Departament of Political Science and Public Law, UAB, and researcher at IGOP.

Fordism put us into massification, by standadizing many processes and outputs. Digitization puts us into individual needs and emotions.

Our present is a public national educational system, to educate masses, and fostered by the State. But the idea of nation is questioned, the idea of system is opposed to network, the idea of masses goes against personalization. Heterogeneity is here to stay.

If what is “public” is in crisis because of the crisis of the state (or the nation-states), how can we vindicate public education, what is public, from the individual point of view? or from the collective but non-governmental point of view?

The concept of expertise, of the expert, is also challenged.

Bauman: how to build intelligent missiles that change their trajectory as targets move or change. How do we maintain an educational structure that is notwithstanding able to adapt to the always changing targets and environment. Can we create cooperating universities? Or universities that are cooperatives?

How can we make up new methodologies and structures and, more important, how can we generate agreements and consensus on how to sustain these new methodologies and structures.

Discussion

Jordi Collet: is innovation ideologically neutral? Subirats: surely not. Peña-López: as innovation is the application of technology, and technology is the realization of science, it is very difficult to avoid adding ideology in each step of application.

Jordi Collet: how to go from theory to practice? Peña-López: 1) creating spaces of conversation, of sharing, enabling platforms, networks; 2) accelerate conversation; 3) foster skills to learn how to learn. Subirats: combining self-learning and processes of collaborative building.

Ramon Grau: how do we spread the gospel of innovation? how do we tear down the ancient regime? Peña-López: it may be just to soon for many people to acknowledge changes. It will take time and pedagogy. Subirats: raising awareness on new practices, new ways of doing things.

Q: How do we foster critical thinking and critical use of technology and networks? Peña-López: we should apply technology to improve training of trainers so that those can improve learning methodologies that can act upon pre-existing inequalities, as the knowledge gap hypothesis has evidenced again and again.

Joan Badia: How do we educate for uncertainty? what happens with values? Peñ-López: same answer as before: the Internet multiplies inequalities and values. We should act on the substrate at least to change the sign from negative to positive, so that when we multiply we are multiplying in positive. But changing or transferring values with technology and methodologies may not be the best way to change them. Subirats: fostering the idea that education is a common good (not a “public” good), and that it is in the interest of everyone to take care of it, to make it possible, to build it.