ICTlogy

Plan Ceibal is the one-to-one laptop programme that Uruguay is running nation-wide since 2008. It is, in my opinion, a good example of what I would like to see in this kind of programmes. I spoke a little bit more on that programme on From laptops to competences: bridging the digital divide in higher education, but for a brief approach, these are the three main aspects that I like most:

• It is not a one-to-one laptop programme, but an inclusion through education programme. Laptops really come into the programme as a tool.
• The core of the programme is the community, the neighbourhood, the classroom, and not technology. It is social capital — and not technological capital ‐ what is built as a priority.
• They run a honest, thorough, yearly evaluation which highlights the best achievements, identifies the weaknesses and feeds the programme back with rich and useful information.

One of the main commitments of the programme is to create resources for the educators involved in it, including the yearly publication of a book. The latest edition of the “Ceibal book” has already been published as El modelo CEIBAL: Nuevas tendencias para el aprendizaje and I have contributed to the book with a chapter.

My chapter, Educación y Desarrollo en un mundo de redes (Education and development in a world of networks) is a reflection on how ICTs are radically changing what we understand by teachers, educational resources, and infrastructure. It actually is a slight adaptation of the homonymous materials that I had recently prepared for UNDP’s Virtual School.

The resulting chapter is the result of the contributions of some other people with which I am in much debt. Giovanni Guatibonza and Amagoia Salazar more than supervised the first edition for the UNDP, providing very good guidance and suggestions, which I all add to the text. Marion Ikwat is an astonishing editor and proofreader that did not rest until the final text was utterly spotless. Last, I want to thank Graciela Rabajoli not only for inviting me to be part of the book, but for all the information on the programme that she has always fed me with.

Downloads:

Peña-López, I. (2011).
Educación y Desarrollo en un mundo de redes.

Báez, M., García, J. M. & Rabajoli, G. (Comps.) (2011).
El modelo CEIBAL: Nuevas tendencias para el aprendizaje.

Bibliography used in Educación y Desarrollo en un mundo de redes

CEIBAL books

CEIBAL evaluation reports

For the last 15 months I have owned an iPad, which I use for many purposes but, mainly, for my academic activity. Every now and then I am asked or find myself involved in a debate on why and how to use an iPad (or, in general, tablets) for research. Although an offtopic in this blog, this post here will save me lots of typing and talking elsewhere.

For the sake of the context, I must say that I am a social scientist working in the crossroads of the Knowledge Society and development, especially in what is related with individual empowerment (education) and social empowerment (governance). I teach at a 100% online university, which means that all my working tools are a computer, some common software and access to the Internet. My professional life is mostly digitized, and gathered in my personal research portal. I mostly do not work with paper and mostly do not work offline. I am quite a fast typist (my liveblogging sessions a proof of it) and have a very light (circa 1,000g) while powerful laptop which I can take anywhere without hesitation. I do not own any Apple computer and do not plan to own one in the nearest future (i.e. I am not an Apple fan).

So, how does an iPad or a tablet fit in this context at the professional level?

Enhanced Reading

Reading it not anymore what it used to be.

Reading used to be sitting with a bunch of papers. Maybe a pen would be handy to scribble some notes on the margins, underline some sentences. Maybe not on the margins, but on a piece of paper. Maybe even on a notebook. You would stand up to look up something on the dictionary or the encyclopaedia. And that was it.

Now reading is, for starters, not knowing what you will be feeling like reading. Maybe it will it be a couple of academic papers, maybe it will be correcting some assignments, or proofreading a paper of yours. Or them all: some trips are long and you want to carry everything with you. What is the weight of 500 pages? And the weight of 5 MB?

Besides the dictionary, or the encyclopaedia, you might search for a description of Aztec god Tlahuizcalpantecuhtli or you might even want to see how Tlahuizcalpantecuhtli looks like; you can wonder how Dexter Gordon and Wardell Gray would sound like when playing before Jack Kerouac or just listen to a live performance by Gordon & Gray; or you can imagine Jon Krakauer’s Stampede Trail or locate it on a map and pay a visit to it.

Now combine everything said above: picture yourself with a dozen papers; reading all them at the same time (those papers with interesting bibliographies…); underlining and taking notes on them; writing some other notes on a separate file which you can tag and categorize and store and search and retrieve; accessing on the go the authors’ personal websites and their curricula and their list of published works; writing a short e-mail to them asking them for a pre-print of a difficult to find paper; forwarding your annotated copy of the paper to a colleague; or copying and pasting a table of data on a spreadsheet to plot some graphics (why hadn’t they in the original paper?).

And that is enhanced reading.

Picture yourself doing all that sitting (or standing) on the train. Or sitting on your couch.

And that is a tablet.

Why not an eReader

I tried several eReader devices based on e-ink before trying the tablet. There are two main reasons why an eReader is not an option for me:

eReaders are very slow for academic papers reading. They may be fair enough to read a book (whatever its kind) whose content has been repaged for your device and for you to turn the pages sequentially, once a minute or two.

But if you are reading a PDF, A4-sized, with footnotes or endnotes and definitely with a bibliography, you will find yourself turning pages very often. Mainly because it is not optimized for the eReader. And also because the eReader is not prepared (yet) for continuous and quick page-turning. And if you want to compare different papers in parallel, the exercise of exiting a paper, opening a new one, closing that one and going back to the former one… that is simply not bearable for the common human being.

The second reason is that, usually, e-readers lack everything that is not strictly for reading purposes: browsing the internet, writing an e-mail or running an application (notebook, spreadsheet, etc.) are not usually supported by e-Readers. And if they are… aren’t we already talking about a table?

An eReader is mainly to read and to read plain text. But academic reading, enhanced reading, is much more than that.

Why not a laptop?

First of all, there is weight. Even if we assume that your laptop does not weight much more than your average tablet (which is quite an assumption), the iPad, one of the heaviest ones, is similar in weight as a 200 pages hardcover. You are already used to handle that weight. The best ultralight laptop will normally double that weight (and cut to a half the autonomy, BTW): if you think a hardcover edition of a book is heavy, try holding a pair of them for more than a while.

Second, there is comfort. Let’s speak only about reading for a while: for reading purposes, the extra keyboard in the laptop and the tactile screen in the tablet make a huge difference. Not only a keyboard is almost useless when reading — almost because you just type scattered notes ‐, but it is only uncomfortable: it takes extra space (and weight) of your surroundings (remember the crowded train: I spend, on average, 2h on it, daily) and key operating is much more difficult than simply touching a screen.

Besides weight and comfort, there is a third aspect, very subjective, but that I have tested several times, and is friendliness.

I’ve been to several “serious” meetings where people brought their laptops to take notes while I tapped and typed on my iPad. Unbelievable as it might sound, laptops all raised suspicion on whether their owners would be taking notes or reading e-mail or checking their preferred social networking site. On your iPad “of course” you are taking notes. Laptops are for writing and working and iPads are for taking notes, and you are supposed to take notes during a meeting.

And the fact that laptops raise a wall (the screen) between the owner and the rest and the iPad does not (because it rests on your lap or almost flat on the table) makes a huge “emotional” difference. Really.

Related to that, working at home is also different. We scientists know that there is no big difference between reading a paper for work or for leisure. But there actually is a tremendous difference between reading that paper in your home studio sitting in front of your desktop, or reading it sprawling on your couch. Especially if you do not live alone and it’s Sunday. Believe it or not, my Sundays or afternoons are very different now.

On the other side, laptops — or desktops — are unbeatable for writing. But we were talking about (enhanced) reading, right?

The added value of the tablet

In my own experience, the main added value of the tablet can be summarized in some keywords: read, notes, train, couch, shoulder bag.

Having get rid of most my paper usage in the last years, with the tablet I succeeded in getting rid of all paper. Period. This means, specifically, getting rid of:

• The annoying collection of separate sheets and stickies with casual notes you will never revisit but never dare to trash: the tablet keeps them all together, searchable and easy to transfer (to other people by e-mail, to more serious documents).
• Printouts of readings with limited life-span (destroy after read): thousands of times more digital documents in your tablet than printed ones in your usual bag, immediate transfer, time and paper saving — and healthier back.

Even more important than working paperless, the tablet provides full mobility, especially if accompanied with an Internet connection (embedded 3G or using your cellphone as a hotspot). And full mobility means that the tablet is always in my shoulder bag. Instead of everything else. The laptop is something you consider bringing with you: the tablet is always with you, as a pen or a notebook used to be.

For those more curious, I’ve shared my setup (or most of it) in the following set of snapshots. Enjoy.

When we speak about the impact of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) on Education, there are two main approaches that we can follow.

The micro-level approach deals with the impact of ICTs on learning processes and/or the different components of a learning process. The point in the micro-level approach is to tell what the impact will be on how things work and howshould or will they change. The micro-level is about evolutions.

The macro-level approach puts the stress on the system and its foundations. The point in the macro-level approach is to tell what the impact will be on what things work into that system and why. and which will be the new foundations upon to which build a new system. The macro-level is about revolutions.

See, for instance, the following examples, picked at random and with no aim of comprehensiveness:

Both approaches are worth being followed. Most times, there will be no revolution without a well paced set of little evolutions (contradictory as this may sound), and evolutions may eventually lead to sheer revolution when all added up. But. But when a revolution is — a digital revolution, as it now seems to be — clearly coming up in the horizon, time is of the essence: the debates on the evolutions that might be should give way to the debates on the revolutions that may or very likely will be.

Two reflections or corollaries arise from the former statement.

1. The first one is that we have to be able to tell evolutions from revolutions. Statement the like of tablets — or laptops or interactive whiteboards or e-books or iBooks or you-name-it — are going to revolutionize Education are very likely to be either misleading or plain wrong. At least in the way they are usually stated or framed. All the aforementioned examples-in-the-classroom belong to the world if evolution, of innovation: they improve or even radically change the way we do some things, but not things themselves. In other words, tablets may revolutionize lecturing and, as such, make a huge contribution to the evolution of Education. But not revolutionize education.
2. The second one is that if a revolution in Education is about to come — as many people see sings of it, and even work towards it — we certainly should put the focus on systemic changes and not in changes within the system. In other words, we should analyse how evolutions relate to or can contribute to a deep revolution, instead of focusing on evolutions themselves.

It is just normal that, as educators, we feel the urge to deal with the present, with solving the impact of ICTs in our daily lives inside our classrooms. But I believe we should put more effort in looking ahead in the future, in making our evolutions shift towards the path of the systemic change and not in parallel or diverting from it.

During the III European Conference on Information Technology in Education and Society: A Critical Insight (TIES2012) I felt like there was much concern on the micro vision of ICTs in education and just a little bit on the macro side of things. And I sometimes wondered whether that was thinking on your pedicure before having your leg amputated — and, by the way, not having a plan for the upcoming haemorrhage.

On February 15, 2012, I am speaking at a research seminar at the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute on how to use online tools on the process of doing research. This is a very slightly modified version of a former seminar that I did back in January — e-Research: social media for social sciences —, so all the things that were said there apply here: RSS feeds (and a feed reader) are your best friends, a personal website is not an option, adopt tools as you need them (not all of them in a row and without a sense of purpose), and be digital.

Since I began my crusade for the adoption of web 2.0 tools (now social media) to enhance research, I have evolved from the “you do need all this stuff” motto to “you do not need all this stuff… but a couple of things are a must”. So, I would really like to stress a couple of points:

1. In a knowledge society, ICTs are a must. They are a train that you cannot let pass: you will either jump in or you will be crushed under its wheels, but there is no stepping aside. This especially applies for knowledge workers (e.g. scientists). Some people still see the use of some tools (blogs, twitter, RSS feeds) in science as rocket science: this is not even wrong. ICTs are to scientists what tractors are to farmers. Of course you can live without them, but it is very likely that you will be working with less efficiency and less efficacy.
2. Yes, mastering ICTs and those always changing social media require a certain degree of digital competence, which is not innate and, thus, has to be acquired. As the Spanish saying says: there are neither hurries, nor pauses. But lack of digital competence should not stop you from trying to use social media for research (“those ain’t for me”), the same way you began with your elementary maths to end up calculating multinomial logistic regressions.
3. Be digital. Just be it. If you are duplicating your tasks, you are not being digital (enough). Social media is about leveraging what you already did on your computer by putting it online. Your papers, your slides, your notes, your readings… if they’re on digital support, they can be online with minimum effort (if they ere not on digital support, please see point #1). I tend to say that e-Research is about making your “digital life” overlap 90% of your “analogue life”. There is an added 10% extra work, indeed, but it is worth doing it compared to benefits.

Downloads:

Prezi slides:
Peña-López, I. (2011). e-Research: social media for social sciences. Research seminar at the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute. February 15, 2012. Barcelona: ICTlogy.

Slides as a PDF:
Peña-López, I. (2011). e-Research: social media for social sciences. Research seminar at the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute. February 15, 2012. Barcelona: ICTlogy.

Book chapter:
Peña-López, I. (2009). “The personal research portal”. In Hatzipanagos, S. & Warburton, S. (Eds.), Handbook of Research on Social Software and Developing Community Ontologies, Chapter XXVI, 400-414. Hershey: IGI Global.

Educational policies on ICTs and educational innovation: Analysis of the programme Escuela 2.0

(this symposium, coordinated by Manuel Area Moreira, is framed in the research project Las políticas de un “ordenador por niño” en España. Visiones y prácticas del profesorado ante el Programa Escuela 2.0. Una análisis comparado entre Comunidades Autónomas.)

Manuel Area Moreira
An introduction to Escuela 2.0

Escuela 2.0 is a 1-to-1 or one laptop per child project that aims at:

• Offering social equity.
• Develops a national industry in the Knowledge Economy.
• Breaks the isolation of the school.
• Prepares the student to be a XXIst century citizen.
• Enables the innovation of teaching-learning methodologies.

But is technology changing the way we teach and/or students learn? What is being the impact of this project at the methodological level?

Juan de Pablos Pons (Universidad de Sevilla).
Educational policies and good practices with ICTs.

Beyond the typical issues related to infrastructures, it is still difficult that the teachers accept ICTs as an educational tool. And only after this has happened we will be able to talk about producing and/or reusing educational content.

To foster this adoption of ICTs in teaching, a good practices project was started so that actual implementations were shared and, after them, critical elements of success be identified. Good practices, to be qualified as such, must generate a transformation and cause a change.

Good practices were chosen in the field of training, pedagogical guides, teaching innovation, usage of the LMS and international projection.

As an overall conclusion on how the Andalousian teachers felt about Escuela 2.0, they are happy to have more infrastructure, quite well on being able to be trained on the use of instructional technology, but not very confident on the impact of ICTs on teaching.

Cristina Alonso Cano (Universitat de Barcelona).
Policies and practices around ICTs in compulsory education: implications for innovation and improvement.

The consolidated research group “Esbrina, Subjectivitats i Entorns Educatius Contemporanis” (2009SGR 0503) is dedicated to the study of the conditions and current changes in education in a world mediated by digital technologies and visual culture. The research group has a clear goal to acknowledge the potential of ICTs in education.

What should change in policies, schools and people so that the potential of ICTs in education can be realized?

• Questioning policies is a healthy exercise to be able to tell what is causing an impact and what not.
• It is very different to speak about Information and Communication Technologies and Learning and Knowledge Technologies, which ones are we talking about when we speak about technology and transformation in the learning process?
• Local and educational leaders and the community are normally banned from participating in ICT for education policies.

José Miguel Correa Gorospe (Universidad del País Vasco).
Eskola 2.0 Programme: What is it bringing to the educational change in the Basque Country?

(Eskola 2.0 is the Basque version of the Spanish state-wide Escuela 2.0)

Teacher training has been one of the most important flaws of the Eskola 2.0 programme. The programme was also imposed to the Basque school system, ignoring the dynamics of the centres, causing several tensions within the educational system and within schools.

Jesús Valverde Barrocoso (Universidad de Extremadura).
Escuela 2.0: unlearning and transformation vs. continuity and tradition.

During 2002, the region of Extremadura began introducing computers at school, on a one-computer-per-two-children basis. This happened in a much broader initiative (LinEx project) in the region to opt for free software and technological autonomy for the government as a whole, and for the educational system in particular.

Escuela 2.0 had several (and sometimes opposing) goals:

• Academic performance.
• Economic development of a local IT and digital content industry.
• Equity and fight against the digital divide.
• Digital competence.
• Quality of teaching.

Reality in schools: 1/3 of teachers use computers in the classroom on a daily basis, 1/3 use it occasionally, 1/3 never use it. 4/10 teachers use often the interactive digital whiteboard in the classroom.

Related to the methodologia, lectures are still the norm and there is few collaborative work. Indeed, the textbook is the pedagogical resource per excellence, even if there is an increasing demand of digital content.

The role of the IT coordinator is highly valued.

What are the effects of ICTs in the classroom? Above all, engagement. Then, digital competence. And at a distance, some minor improvements in academic performance in general or in some specific tasks.

Hints for the future:

• Flexibility in the kind of resources at the students’ reach.
• Adaptability, getting rid of the syllabus, use of Personal Learning Environments.
• -kess teaching, more learning.
• Sociability, teamworking, networking.
• Creativity.

Ángel San Martin Alonso (Universidad de Valencia).
Educational policies on ICTs and educational innovation: Analysis of the programme Escuela 2.0

When we foster innovation, is it to solve an emerging problem or because we need to keep the wheel of innovation moving and some innovation niches be fed?

Discussion

Teacher training appears on and on during the discussion. There is a total agreement that teachers have to be trained on the application of ICTs in education, on changing curricula, on adapting and transforming learning methodologies. But ICT for Education policies keep on insisting and spending most of the resources in infrastructures.

David Istance (Centre for Educational Research and Innovation, OECD)
Technology Use and Broader Models of Schooling and Learning — common arguments re-examined.

ICTs in education have been a matter of analysis and research since 1980s, including lot of work on adults and lifelong learning and technology, role of technology in higher education (especially e-learning), schools, digital literacy, curriculum change, students assessment, equipment, teacher training, leadership, open educational resources, millennium learners, etc.

More recent reports show the importance of digital literacy and competence in two ways: as a tool in itself, and as a means to achieve better performance on traditional disciplines, especially writing and reading.

Innovative learning environments

ILE aims to inform practice, leadership and reform through analysis of innovative configurations of learning for children and young people, on three strands: learning research, innovative cases, and implementation and change.

Learning conclusions. Environments should:

• Make learning central, encourage engagement, and be where learners come to understand themselves as learners.
• Ensure that learning is social and often collaborative.
• Be highly attuned to learners’ motivations and the importance of emotions.
• Be acutely sensitive to individual differences including in prior knowledge.
• Be demanding for each learner but without excessive overload.
• Use assessments consistent with its aims, with strong emphasis on formative feedback.
• Promote horizontal connectedness across activities and subjects, in-and out-of-school.
• All these characteristics should be present, and not just one or two of them.

So, is technology on of the learning principles? Maybe not. Technology is more implicit rather than explicit in the learning ‘principles’. There is the important distinction between technology-centred and learner-centred approaches to learning with technology:

• Fostering engagement.
• Learning with others.
• Supporting targeted respondses to difference and facilitating personalization.
• Underpinning assessment for learning.
• Providing connectedness (to others, to knowledge, etc.).

Motors and locus of innovation in education

OECD (2004). Innovation in the Knowledge Economy: Implications for Education and Learning analysed four sources of innovation or pumps:

• The science pump: knowledge and research.
• Networking pump: creating scale and synergies.
• The reorganisation pump: modular restructuring.
• The technology pump: more efficiency, new ways and means.

Education is not strong on any of these. On the other hand, technology is integral to all of them, not just in the technology pump.

There is a common framework implicit in much research and discussion of schooling an learning: system -> school -> class -> teacher -> learner. But, when we think about innovative learning environments, can we go beyond that framework? Can we go beyond institutional structures? Do we have to assume that institutions are given and are the existing ones? Does non-formal learning has a place in this framework? Can we have a look at the environment, and not at the single school, the single class, the single teacher, etc.?

New dynamics and organisation of learning environments:

• Who: learners.
• With whom: teachers.
• With what: resources.
• What: content.
• How: reorganized learning activities and pedagogies.
• Learning leadership.

This scheme has a result, which is learning, information about learning activities, learners and outcomes, upon which evaluation and assessment can be applied. Learning feedback comes at the end and can be used by the learning leader to restart the whole process.

This learning environment has to be embedded in a wider systemic framework. On the one hand, and at the micro level, it is closely related to the institutional environment. On the other hand, a+dn at the meso level, there are networks of environments and networks of practice. Last, and at the macro level, policy-setting and framing conditions determine the whole system.

The report Connected Minds, from the New Millennium Learners project, compares the competing ‘evangelist’ vs. ‘sceptic’ theses, states that technology and social media are importantly changing social and cultural environment, but there still is no evidence that young people want radically different learning environments. In fact, they want engagement, convenience (any time, anywhere) and enhanced productivity. There is, also, a need for working out the implications of the changing digital world for what schools should do.

How does the future of schooling look like? The OECD schooling scenarios:

• The bureaucratic system continues, and even gets stronger.
• Re-schooling I: Schools as focused learning organisations.
• Re-schooling II: Schools as core social centres.
• De-schooling I: Radical extension of the market model.
• De-schooling II: Learning networks and the Network Society.
• De-schooling III: Teacher exodus and system meltdown.

We need to reflect on what we want education for youth to look like, and see whether we can go beyond a single model (and single stereotype) of school for all aged 3 to 19 y.o. It should be possible to have an intense shared schooling experience, high quality and resourced for 3-13yo (bureaucracy and re-schooling), and diverse experiences, programmes and hybrids for all 14-19 y.o, including basic university (re-schooling and de-schooling).