ICTlogy

Communications session on Planning teaching through ICTs. Chairs: Patricia Escribano, School of Law and Political Science, UOC

Teaching methodologies to stimulate the interest in a subject with the help of ICTs
Antoni Carreras Casanovas, Universitat Rovira i Virgili.

This is an experience with undergrad (Labour Law, Journalism) students of Constitutional Law, that has been running for 4 years.

There is a mix of theory and practice. The practical part requires writing collaboratively an essay/dossier and presenting it in public, normally taped in video. Another practice consists in online debates on current issues that appear in the news. Last, a final test is performed on the topics that have appeared in each online debate.

Results: the assessment of the experience has been valued by the students with 8/10 for all the experiences (presentations, debates, news). The final marks have also increased in circa 15%.

More information

• Website of the subject on labour law and occupation.

A proposal for teaching Law Philosophy with technology: interdependence knowledge-learning in thinking skills
Nuria Belloso Martín & Helena Nadal Sánchez, Universidad de Burgos.

We support the idea that ICTs should be used to enrich the traditional lecture, instead of substitute it. The problem of the traditional lecture is that the knowledge that is transmitted cannot be examined, the student cannot have a bound with that knowledge. Thus, the goal of this experience is to enhance participation.

During the first part of the lecture, the lecture is done as usual but a document is handled to the student with references and further reading. Then, a second document is handled with assignments that the student has to complete — normally assignments that require some browsing on the Internet.

Methodology and electronic resources to design and develop a subject in the area of Financial and Tributary Law in offline and online mode
Amable Corcuera Torres, Universidad de Burgos.

Use of Moodle not to make a difference between students that choose to attend classes and students that choose not to or just cannot attend classes.

Traditional lectures are also taped on video and then uploaded to the University repository, and linked from the class space on Moodle.

More information

• Repository of learning materials of the University of Burgos.

Discussion

Ismael Peña-López: where is the line that separates engagement and overwhelming the student with workload? Antoni Carreras: a first thing to take into account is that the topics have to be attractive and useful to the student. Having the news as a source of topics is usually a good idea to find out attractive and interesting topics. On the other hand, what the students have to do is just keep with the pace of the schedule. Assignments always deal with the most recent lecture, so that they are about reinforcing, with a little bit of effort, what has just been covered in the class. So, it is not a lot of burden, but what the student should otherwise do to review and study the latest lesson of the subject.

Q: should the use of ICTs be fostered on an cost-savings basis? Corcuera, Nadal: of course knowledge should be open and free, but the use of ICTs should be pedagogy-led and not economy-led.

Q: does taping conditions in any sense the way the lecture is imparted? Amable Corcuera: no, it does not.

Q: how does the syllabus change or is adapted to a different way of assessing the students? Antoni Carreras: there is no problem in adapting the syllabus to the new platforms or whatever.

Keynote speech Paul Anthony Maharg, Law professor at Northumbria Law School.

Assessing legal professionalism in simulations: The case of SIMPLE
Paul Anthony Maharg, Law professor at Northumbria Law School

In a course for professionals, a collection of outcomes must be reached. To measure how much the outcomes have been reached, both positive and negative indicators have been designed for performance assessment. Thus, not only professionalism but also unprofessional behaviour is also measured.

The SIMPLE platform is specially designed for professional learning:

• Personalized learning in a professional environment.
• Collaborative learning.
• Use of simulation spaces.
• Use of rich media.
• Authenticity.

The whole system is based on transactions — transactional learning — where the students have an active learning by performing authentic transactions. The platform is used at three levels: as a workspace, as a learning space and as an assessment space.

Teaching with the SIMPLE platform, based on simulations, is very feasible, and the impact is big while the cost is relative low. Provided there is experience enough to write the simulations — which there usually is — the cost is reduced, as producing learning materials is usually more expensive than designing simulations and putting them into practice.

A next step could be the “appification” of the course, just like BarMax did with the US Bar exam.

The combination of simulations with other advancements of education like PLEs, aggregation of content (learning as aggregation). Think of aggregation as the social media of our student’s nested lives, a genealogy of knowledge, an ethical practice community.

Lee Shulman’s signature pedagogies:

• Surface structure: observable, behavioural structures.
• Tacit structure: values and dispositions that the behaviour implicitly models.
• Deep structure: underlying intentions, rationale or theory that the behaviour models.
• Shadow structure: The absent pedagogy that is, or is only weakly, engaged.

Discussion

Ismael Peña-López: has assessment been done through e-Portfolios? Maharg: no, but this is definitely the way to go. Moodle+Mahara could be an option in the nearest future, but definitely an e-Portfolio would help in straightening the bounds between students and firms.

More information

• SimShare, where educators can share simulations, role plays and case studies.
• An example of a simulation on the SimShare platform.
• Webcasts on Civil Litigation, Law School, University of Starthclyde

On June 8h, 2012, my colleague Agustí Cerrillo-Martínez and I are presenting a communication at the 3rd Conference on Law Education and Information and Communication Technologies.

For the last two years we have been using microblogging (StatusNet) in the virtual classroom of the graduate studies on e-Government. The first year, during the pilot phase of the project, the experience went quite well: it helped the students to feel less alone in their online learning process, and there was some interesting sharing of external resources too. This year the experience has been a total success.

There are two main differences from last year’s edition to this year’s:

• A greater uptake of nanoblogging and web 2.0 tools in general both by students and professors.
• A much more commitment of the professors that gave a much greater sense of purpose to the tool.

In fact, we believe that this last reason (which actually is a double one) is the main reason for success. And it might sound obvious to most readers (of course teacher engagement is important, of course thinking about the goals and not the tool is important), but there still is some feeling of “build it and they will come” in the field of instructional technology.

In our case, we did have our problems/goals and we did come up with the microblog as a solution to our problems when the initial team met and designed the project (for further information, please see Microblogging in a Virtual Classroom and Herramientas colaborativas en las aulas. Microblogging). But we definitely needed a pilot phase to learn how to realize the potential of the tool and make the best of it. And teacher involvement and expertise in the tool was much more important that what we initially thought.

As per the outcomes part, we are happy that the microblog opened a breach in the “walls” of the virtual campus. The microblog acted as a trojan horse that enabled feeding the virtual classroom with information from “the outside”. This has double importance for us: on the one hand, it breaks the lecture-like structure of the learning process; on the other hand, it implicitly tells that there is no inside-outside learning, that there is no formal-informal learning: learning just is, and it just happens in different ways depending on the people with whom you learn and the place where you just happen to be.

This last statement has always been true. But the need to make the learning process efficient and effective end up with it being bound within the school and the university, and limited in a given period of time (during the day, during one’s life). It is just now, that we have learning and knowledge technologies, that we can recover a learning that happens in the continuum, and not discretionary.

A second outcome, and one that strengthens the previous one, is that the classroom has become a more participative one. If in the first edition some students would randomly share resources, the second edition has been rich with interaction. Information has still been the currency upon which interaction has been built, but the greater engagement has turned the microblog a meeting place, not an information posting place. We believe that, even if just slightly, the microblog contributed to turn a classroom into a community of learning and practice.

Here follow the materials for this communication. The slides of the presentation are available in English and Spanish. The full text of the communication is only available in Spanish.

English

Slides as PDF:
Peña-López, I. & Cerrillo-Martínez, A. (2012). Microblogging in the classroom. From information to participation. III Conference on Law teaching and Information and Communication Technologies. 8 June 2012. Barcelona.

Spanish

Presentación como PDF:
Peña-López, I. & Cerrillo-Martínez, A. (2012). Microblogging en el aula. De la información a la participación. III Jornada sobre docencia del Derecho y Tecnologías de la Información y la Comunicación . 8 de Junio de 2012. Barcelona.

Texto de la comunicación:
Peña-López, I. & Cerrillo-Martínez, A. (2012). Microblogging en el aula. De la información a la participación. III Jornada sobre docencia del Derecho y Tecnologías de la Información y la Comunicación . 8 de Junio de 2012. Barcelona.

Digitalingua, the International Conference on Digital Environments and Language Learning, took place last week and I was interviewed by one of the organizers, Lola Torres on the topic of Personal Learning Environments (PLE).

Below you can find the original text of the interview in Spanish, and a quick translation into English.

Interview (by Lola Torres):
Peña-López, I. (2012). Personal Learning Environments. Interview for Digitalingua 2012.

What do you mean by PLE?

Although certainly not the best way to define a thing, I like to
think on the Personal Learning Environment as opposed to two aspects of learning, which are, still today, the orthodox and hegemonic form to understand education (and note the change of “learning” to “education” is fully conscious).

When we think of learning we tend to circumscribe it into a formal and institutional environment. Formal in the sense that one “sets” oneself to learn, at a specific time and place, at a stage of life intended for it, and with a more or less defined plan (goals, methodology, schedule). Institutional in the sense that all this is provided in an exogenous way, by an institution (teacher, school, university, academia) that is who determines all aspects of formal learning, which is why we have to move from learning to being taught or educated.

The Personal Learning Environment is rethinking the whole process of learning from the informal and the endogenous or non-institutional, everyone becoming responsible for their own learning plan. And this is largely possible by the digital revolution: the knowledge contained in people and objects is
now available to anyone, anywhere, anytime. So, I understand the PLE as a set of conscious strategies to use technological tools to access the knowledge contained in objects and people and thereby achieve certain learning goals.

Could you explain your PLE as a teacher and as a researcher?

For me it is essential to consider research and teaching as two
sides of the same coin, the coin of knowledge. In this sense, research is but learning, and teaching is but learning
backwards. Thus, there is not a PLE for teaching and another one for research, but there is a PLE that sometimes works in one direction and sometimes in the other one.

And the very same consideration applies, in my opinion, for the PLE of a student. In the same train of thought of considering the PLE as a learning strategy in an open environment enabled by technology, I think is increasingly difficult to argue that the student must always be placed at the end where one only receives knowledge: the PLE puts the person, the learner, in the centre of a mesh whose purpose is that knowledge flows from one node to another one.

In this sense, I do not think there are different PLEs for teachers/researchers or students, but all of them are nodes of the same mesh. It will just happen that in some topics some nodes in that mesh will be denser than others, or that knowledge flows more fluently in some directions than others, but it will be a matter of
flows (thus temporary) rather than of architectures (or structural).

That said, my PLE responds to a simple conceptual framework:

• What sources of knowledge do I feed from.
• Who do I say that I am, although the sources that one feed from also make up much of the public person that sits in the centre of my PLE.
• What I create, which is merely the result of certain knowledge sources transiting through me, producing a new point of view, a gathering of knowledges previously isolated or, at best, a small addition to the original set of knowledges.

What challenge is education-teachers, universities, institutions
education, compared to PLE?

From the moment that we are talking about teachers vs. students, about institutions vs. individuals, about learning vs. leisure, we are creating a series of dichotomies which necessarily place those terms in opposition. But the PLE, if we stick to its definition as a mesh of people and objects oriented towards learning, cannot be conceived as a set of dichotomies or elements placed in opposition.

To consider that the PLE is a good learning tool is to assume,
implicitly, that there has been a radical change in the sociocultural and economic context and that this makes the PLE possible. So, the biggest challenge of Education is to carry on an extraordinary reflection about many things that we now take for granted and, if we end up assuming that the context has changed, it is also possible that the very same foundations of that we call education may also have changed.

Thus, PLEs do not present a challenge in themselves: I believe that PLEs are a symptom of a deep systemic change that goes beyond education. And that systemic change is the real challenge. Digitization challenges basic concepts in Education. Digital content — reproducible, storable and transferable at lowest cost — make irrelevant many of the functions of documentation centres as silos of books. Telecommunications — fast, cheap and ubiquitous — make also irrelevant schools as hubs of talent. And the concentration of content and talent is the foundation of schools, universities, research centres and libraries.

PLEs are proof that some features of the current institutions can be carried on ??by other “institutions”, and that there is a need to rethink what new role in society should have the former ones.

What advice would you give to a language teacher to start your PLE?

Although this reflection is ex-post, it has helped me — and still does — to identify four stages in the use of a methodology or a technology in setting up my own PLE.

In a first stage, appropriation, one has to know what methods or what technologies exist, what skills should be apprehended to get the best of them, and what are their pros and cons. In this respect, staying up to date of what exists and how people use it is to me a first elemental approach. All in all, it is about initiating the learning process beginning with methods and tools, the same way we know how to locate the nearest library or instruct ourselves in the use of files for our working notes.

The second step is to adapt the methodology or the technology. This step consists in replacing a methodology or technology in a task that we already performed, with the only purpose of replacement of one technology by another one. Even if it might seem absurd to have invested resources to end up remaining in the same place, this phase will help us in answering the following question: to identify “why” or “what for” will I use the PLE, a crucial question that cannot have a void answer. Some people will then begin to manage the sources of information with an RSS feed reader, something that one quickly gets used to by the utility that
it provides. Others will start to sort their bibliographic resources. Others will replace paper notes with a blog or a wiki, always handy, sorted and enabling queries. Others will publish digital files that they had already produced, in various Internet services to increase their outreach.

Once the first the phases of appropriation and adaptation are over, it is then time to improve our learning processes, to make it more effective and/or more efficient. This is often the most rewarding part, as it is when the investment we made in time and effort starts to make sense. If we start with something
easy and something where the impact will be greater, the relative returns will be higher. Following the previous examples, reading information sources can be accompanied by storing what may seem more relevant to us or sharing it on social networking sites to enrich the debate and help in building a network. Or if we publish our notes in a blog we can try and embed our slides, using the most relevant tags, accompanying the slides in our blog with references that we retrieved from our bibliographic manager.

Finally, beyond the improvement of processes, the last phase consists in radically transform these processes. A transformation — if notthe transformation — is to “think digital”. That is, for instance, other than taking notes and copying them to the blog, taking instead the laptop to a talk and liveblog the talk while, at the same time, tweeting the event. What once was an individual and private act becomes now a collective and public act.

And it is in this transformation of the private sphere where we transform the whole system, breaking the personal dichotomies to be able to rethink education as a whole.

On 14 May 2012 I imparted a seminar at the Magister Lvcentinvs on Intellectual Property at the University of Alicante, Spain, kindly invited by Aureio López-Tarruella, expert and professor on Intellectual Property.

The purpose of my session was to provide a frame to explain while Law is nowadays having more trouble than usual in trying to solve many of today’s problems. In other words, the goal was not to enter in specific issues that Law can difficultly fix, but to reflect on how the foundations of our industrial society are being challenged by digitization and Information and Communication Technologies and, thus, how the Law that was built upon those foundations is shaking from head to toes.

The (long!) session was split in three parts

1. The Network Society, or how industrial institutions’ feet became of clay, which explains how the end of scarcity and transaction costs in the areas of knowledge is questioning most of our institutions — Law amongst them.
2. The Web 2.0, or how individuals became mass media, which explains how the addition of the social layer to the World Wide Web has transformed communication, culture and creation as we knew it.
3. The Internet, or how Law became (even) more complicated, where some specific practices and malpractices are identified on a typical task done through the Internet — and challenging the concepts of who or what is the sender, the receiver, the message, the channel or the code.

Here follow the materials that I used in the session and a short collection of bibliographic references.

The Network Society, or how industrial institutions’ feet became of clay

Downloads:

Prezi slides:
Peña-López, I. (2012). The Network Society, or how industrial institutions’ feet became of clay. Seminar at the Magister Lvcentinvs on Intellectual Property, University of Alicante, 14 May 2012.

Prezi slides:
Peña-López, I. (2012). The Network Society, or how industrial institutions’ feet became of clay. Seminar at the Magister Lvcentinvs on Intellectual Property, University of Alicante, 14 May 2012.

The Web 2.0, or how individuals became mass media

Downloads:

Prezi slides:
Peña-López, I. (2012). The Web 2.0, or how individuals became mass media. Seminar at the Magister Lvcentinvs on Intellectual Property, University of Alicante, 14 May 2012.

Prezi slides:
Peña-López, I. (2012). The Web 2.0, or how individuals became mass media. Seminar at the Magister Lvcentinvs on Intellectual Property, University of Alicante, 14 May 2012.

The Internet, or how Law became (even) more complicated

Downloads:

Prezi slides:
Peña-López, I. (2012). The Internet, or how Law became (even) more complicated. Seminar at the Magister Lvcentinvs on Intellectual Property, University of Alicante, 14 May 2012.

Prezi slides:
Peña-López, I. (2012). The Internet, or how Law became (even) more complicated. Seminar at the Magister Lvcentinvs on Intellectual Property, University of Alicante, 14 May 2012.

Further reading

My colleagues Ana Rodera, Anna Espasa and Teresa Guasch asked me to answer a survey in the framework of the eLene2Learn research project.

Amongst all the questions, there were two the answers I provided I would like to keep… and share. I answered quite quickly and they come here in the rough. I am sure a thorough reflection would present more accurate thoughts, but I don’t think the general idea would change a lot:

What are the main advantages of teaching-learning using social web technologies?

• More control on the learning process by the learners themselves.
• More focus on the learning part, trading with a lesser weight on the teaching part.
• Increased importance of the learning process, with decreased (relative) importance of the content in the syllabus.
• Opening of the formal learning processes towards scenarios belonging to the scope of non-formal learning and, especially, of informal learning.
• Dramatic increase of the learning resources (content, experts, tools) at the learners’ reach.
• Merging (and confusion) of the different areas of life: learning, professional, personal, leisure.

What are the main disadvantages of teaching-learning using social web technologies?

• They demand high (or highest) digital competences. These are a must to make the best of social web technologies and an important barrier of entrance.
• They require a certain knowledge in identifying one’s training and educational needs and being able to formulate them as such.
• They require a certain capacity to design (autonomous) learning strategies.
• Abundance of resources imply that filtering becomes necessary and, thus, filtering competences are important.
• Even with the appropriate filtering competences, noise and distraction will happen.
• Merging (and confusion) of the different areas of life: learning, professional, personal, leisure (indeed, this is a double edged sword).