Innovative uses of ICTs in teaching and learning processes
Jeff Miller (The University of British Columbia) Beyond the Learning Management System: Integrating Social Media in a Master’s of Educational Technology Program.
30 students follow the Master of Educational Technology at UBC. The idea behind the project was open new spaces by means of social media.
Affordances/constraints:
Who is “in charge”?
Who has the ability and authority to write/speak?
What design tools are available to teachers/students?
Who decides on the structure/content of materials and activities?
What is private and what is public?
How do we track engagement out of an LMS?
At the end of the course, all the scholarship is public.
In another course (ETEC540), part of the course is sitting on WebCT, but another part of it is out on the open at the UBC Wiki for ETEC540. Blogs were also used, but it came out that blogs are much less creative than wikis. And normally, the outcome of materials made by the students is bigger than the original material that the teacher put initially on the course’s website.
One of the biggest design challenges is how to create a community in each and every space, how to engage the members of that community, foster creation and not passive “consumption” of (learning) material, etc.
A good practice is to use leading edge technology, but not bleeding edge one; negotiating public and private learning spaces; developing sustainable development and delivery models; negotiating new roles.
Alfredo Álvarez Álvarez, María Dolores Porto Requejo (Universidad de Alcalá). Collaborative environments 2.0 in the learning of languages in the university.
Web 2.0 and higher education: enables learner-centered teaching, individualized monitoring (different learning paths), autonomy in the learning process, reflection over one’s own learning (self-assessment).
Web 2.0 and language learning: need of valid experiences, lack of measuring instruments, need to reorganize traditional competences.
Social networking sites offer the possibility to interact amongst one’s peers and this stimulates the generation of knowledge. This stimulation is enhanced by the novelty of the platform.
Wikis and Social Networking Sites (Ning):
Enable “real” activities (not only for the teacher’s eyes).
Enable constant revisioning.
High level of participation.
Do not normally pose any difficulty in the use of the tool.
Higher levels of self-confidence, as one’s evolution is quickly realized.
High degrees of autonomy in the learning process.
New and crossed leaderships: students leading a given discipline (i.e. get higher marks) work together with other (usually different) students that lead the usage or appropriation of the technology.
Stimulate collaborative learning.
Open possibilities of team working.
Are perceived as personal spaces, neither working or learning spaces nor institutional spaces.
Karina Olmedo, Mariona Grané, Lucrezia Crescenzi, Rafael Suárez (Laboratori de Mitjans Interactius – Universidad de Barcelona). Integration of mobile devicees in traditional e-learning environments.
How do students value the use of ICTs and mobile devices in learning processes? How does the use of the Internet and mobile devices once they have been used for learning?
The project was carried out on a master’s course on community managing. The mobile device was an iPad.
Most of the interaction in the course took place on a forum. Interviews were used to get the evaluation of the students on their learning processes, the usage of technology during and after the course, etc.
Most of the students changed their behaviours concerning the Internet: kind of usage and, most especially, the places where they use to connect to the Internet and the amount of time connected during the day, etc.
Adelaida Martín Bosque (CEA – University of New Haven); Mar Mejías Caravaca (IES Abroad Barcelona). Twitter en la clase de ELE: desarrollando la PLN (Personal Learning Network) de los estudiantes.
Undergraduate students from the US that study Spanish for a semester in Barcelona, on an A1.1. and B2.1 level course lasting 45-60h.
First steps: create a new twitter account. On the one hand, they will be twitting in Spanish, and their followers are (usually) non-Spanish speakers. On the other hand, because of privacy issues.
Hashtags will be used to monitor the conversation on Twitter. Of course, the hashtag can be used by other people not belonging to the course but willing to join the ongoing conversation. Some directions were given on the number of tweets, how interaction should be (e.g. addressed not to the teacher, but to their peers), and some hints on who to follow on Twitter (celebrities, writers, etc. in other words, to get out of the community of the classroom).
Some examples:
Interaction with other users leads to language correcting amongst peers, or even self-correcting.
Mentions to other users and usage of several hashtags out of the course’s one.
Pros:
Establishment of a strong learning community: #dudasELE.
Overcoming the barriers of time and space.
Development and use of communicative and metacognitive strategies.
Development of the student’s digital competence.
Integration of Web 2.0 tols.
Cons:
Lack of Twitter expertise.
Interference with personal life (the solution being a new dedicated account).
Lack of trust in the tool (“Why do I have to use Twitter?”)
Present and future of PLE: conceptualization, practice and critic of Personal Learning Environments
Torres-Kompen, R. (Citilab) Personal Learning Environments, the state of the question.
What environment? What kind of learning?
Traditional learning usually means time and space constraints, a scheduled structure, lack of flexibility and a given period of time.
PLEs are systems, based on social media, or web 2.0 tools, and many see them as a unique point of access to our digital persona. Other think of PLEs as a way to manage one’s knowledge and to monitor or track our personal learning process.
PLEs are usually defined as dichotomies: object vs. concept, personal vs. personalized, PLE vs. VLE, PLE vs. iPLE (institutional/institutionalized), lifelong vs. project-related, aggregation of free tools vs. mash-up system.
There are recurrent concepts around PLEs: web 2.0, e-portfolio, long-life learning, etc.
Most of the earliest literature was about defining what the PLE was and proposing structures or architectures for practical PLE. After that firts phase
Casquero, O. (Universidad del País Vasco); Peña-López, I. (Universitat Oberta de Calalunya). Technological challenges (and strategy) of the PLE in educational institutions.
PLE (Adell & Castañeda, 2010): “the set of tools, sources of information, connections and actgivities that every person uses frequently to learn”.
PLEs have a place in higher education, and can be fostered by institutions: SAPO Campus, southhampton Learning Environment, SocialLearn, Google Apps for educatgion, VLEs “on steroids”… They all integrate external services, connect different tools, etc.
When institutions face fostering PLEs, they have to face two kind of users: the ones that already have a PLE and just have to connect to the institutional sphere, and the ones that do not have one and/or do not know how to build it. To the latter ones, the institution can provide an already-built PLE that the user will then be able to appropriate and customize: the iPLE (institutionally-powered or institutionally-enriched PLE).
But this does not only mean that the institution provides or allows third parties’ services within the institution, but also that the institution opens up its own (information) system so that it can be accessed from outside. This way, information can both flow inbound and outbound.
Strategy to put up an iPLE strategy:
Creating a collective intelligence.
Letting the community provide recommendations and resources, identifying resources and users that are critical for success, visualizing onw’s own activity, etc.
An infrastructure based on nodes, connections amongst nodes, learn-streaming (automatically generating a record of one’s personal learning process).
Castañeda, L. (Universidad de Murcia); Adell, J. (Universitat Jaume I) Methodological challenges of PLE.
PLEs should generate new methodologies. To do so, we have to know how knowledge is build. And knwoledge nowadays is extremely fluid. Learning has evolved from a cognitivist approach to the edypunk DIY, the Do It Socially, the Learn It Yourself and, at last, to the Learn It Openly or Social networked learning.
PLEs are — or should be — enriched learning environments. And enriching means, above all, decentralization, fragmentation. To be able to manage the decentralization of the sources of information/learning we have to be able to be autonomous in the management of these sources.
If sources are multiple, disciplines have to give way to more multidisciplinary approaches and ways to learn.
Again, the dichotomies: flexible vs. standardized, open and fluid vs. closed, integrated and competence-based vs. compartimentalized, independent vs. alone, autonomous vs. chaotic.
It is not about putting the PLE into the methodology, but that our methodologies take into account the students’ PLEs.
Ismael Peña-López (Universitat Oberta de Calalunya) The PLE as a personal tool for the researcher and the teacher
Adell, J. (Universitat Jaume I); Castañeda, L. (Universidad de Murcia); Casquero, O. (Universidad del País Vasco); Peña-López, I. (Universitat Oberta de Calalunya); Torres-Kompen, R. (Citilab). The future of PLE.
We should get over the conceptual debate, the acronyms, the nature or the concept, etc. and switch towards a theoretical expansion, a technological development, and, especially, towards context of application.
Theoretical expansion: deal with other educational theories.
Technological development: the LMS still is the core, but the architecture and the technological environment will be “2.0”. There is an urgent need to tear down the walls of LMSs, integrating tools 2.0, e-portfolios, etc.
Contexts of application: the revolution of e-learning, the training of educators, the educators’ professional training and long-life learning, etc.
The main challenges are how to drive changes within institutions and, most especially, within methodologies, the changes of role of teachers, etc.
Share:
III European Conference on Information Technology in Education and Society: A Critical Insight (2012)
Neil Selwyn Social media, social learning? Considering the limits of the ‘social turn’ in contemporary educational technology.
It has become very difficult to talk about the Internet without talking about social media: the default will be social.
What are the key features of social media and what is their significance to contemporary education and learning? How are social media applications currently being used in education and/or by learners? What are the limitations — if any — of these new media in the educational field? What changes does education need to perform to adapt to the new social media landscape?
Internet applications have also transformed the concept of authorship: massive amounts of people create, share, distribute, remix content all the time, most of the times unintentionally or tacitly. There is now mass socialisation and mass participation. Internet
Different (philosophical) points of view on social media
Increase informality
Increase individualism, decentralizes power.
Increases collectivism, is the group using a common shared tool.
Social media and education:
Engaging: students like social media, so why should not education be using it?
Empowering: anyone can create content, learn, etc.
Social media and educational institutions:
Implies a deep reorganisation of educational institutions, making them more fluid, flexible.
Can imply the replacement of educational institutions.
Social media as a context for learning: inquiry, collaboration, publication, literacy. But this hardly works within the boundaries of institutions. There still is a limited institutional use of social medial.
On the other hand, there are uneven levels of social media interest, access and usage amongst students. The “digital native” is a myth: there are (HJargittai & Hsieh, 2010) omnivores, devotees, samplers dabblers and non-users; or (Eynon & Mamlberg, 2011) active participators, all-rounders, normatives and peripherals. And social media is not levelling the ground, but just the contrary.
There also is a commodified nature of social media use. What you do on social media becomes a commodity: it is more important not what you did, but how many people liked it or followed it, how many people gave value to it… but you. And this affects people’s behavior.
And what happens with non-participation? Not to speak about the quality of participation: There is the usual rule of thumb of 1% people creating, 9% engaging/commenting and 90% just watching.
So, what should we do?
Are there differences in social media as a ‘learning technology’ as opposed to a ‘living technology’?
how do the creative, communal an productive practices and activities associated with social media fit with the practices and activities that are dominant in educational settings?<7p>
How could the educational community be better involved in shaping forms of social media along different, more educationally-orientated lines?
How can the educational community challenge the shaping of social media by commercial forces and other established elites?
Now that we are past the stage of hype and also the stage of disillusionment, now that we are reaching the “plateau of productivity” of these new technologies, we can reflect quietly and thoroughly about all these questions.
Share:
III European Conference on Information Technology in Education and Society: A Critical Insight (2012)
Juana M. Sancho-Gil Technological affluence, educational precariousness: a look at the last 20 years.
In the recent 20 years of instructional technology, everything that was said on technology belongs now to archaeology of technology, while what was said about pedagogy stands actual.
Some technologies are certainly not addressed to fulfil some existing needs, but do actually create new needs that come to existence once the new technology is widely adopted.
Do we understand everything that is happening in the field of technology?
Can we process all the information that is now available, that is now getting to us?
Who is the expert that will help us in finding a way through new technologies and information? Certainly not today’s education, inflexible and aimed at marks and not learning.
New learners have multiple sources of information, and thus, they have new ways of learning. How is the educational system adapting to this new landscape? What should the educational system be doing?
Some of these initiatives — the latter, for instance — are suspicious of being more a technological initiative rather than a pedagogical one, which poses many issues on its legitimacy, its suitability, its sustainability, its expected impact, etc.
What has actually changed in the last years in the school?
There has been a huge increase on assessment, especially based on standardized tests, with some “collateral damages” (Nichols and Berliner, 2007).
And we still think more in technological terms rather than on pedagogical terms, and many of these times to be able to control students: webcams in the classrooms, “check in” software to know whether the student attended class, etc. Of course, this does not mean that the teacher should not be digitally competent, which should.
In most recent years, this has been accompanied by a global crisis and budget cuts everywhere especially in education.
An agenda for the 21st century education
Encourage students to:
Understand and responsible participate in a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) world.
Continue learning throughout the whole life.
Comprehend how knowledge interrelates. All knowledge is related to other knowledge(s).
Be able to transfer knowledge and skills gained in one context into another one.
Some challenges to be met:
Educate “symbolic analysts”.
Consider the new forms of knowledge production, representation and transmission.
Take into account the emergent contributions of the learning sciences and neurosciences regarding how people learn. And thus adapt our teaching to the findings of those disciplines, so to fit teaching with learning.
Pay attention to the current diversification of ways and modalities of reading and writing (multiliteracies).
Bear in mind learning experiences and a cultural background.
So, what technologies can help us in meeting these and other educational challenges?
Share:
III European Conference on Information Technology in Education and Society: A Critical Insight (2012)
When we speak about politics and social networking sites, we’re used to speak about David vs. Goliath: common people fighting against the powerful.
For the first time in many years, we are not facing a strong political power, but a weak political power. A political power disconcerted by the markets, globalization, a smart society. But, is that society that smart? Is it true that the digital revolution has had an impact on politics (and political parties and governments) and not on common people? Why should be common people be spared from that impact?
It is only natural that the political system and what happens out of it (unions, nonprofits, civil associations, etc.) advance in parallel and, in their confrontation, consensus and solutions emerge. This means that it is interaction what makes society advance, and not that it is society that is right despite the opposition of the political system.
Indeed, we do need an articulated civil society, as articulated as political parties and governments. Not a chaotic or disorganized one. Only an organized civic society can face a disorganized, weak political power. But there is a deep difficulty to articulate a general purpose strategy, especially when populisms leverage the fact that no-one seems to be accountable for their decisions.
The utopia of dis-intermediation
We are witnessing times were intermediation is toughly fought against: there seem to be no need for politicians, journalists, teachers, distributing industries, etc.
While there may be a positive side of dis-intermediation (lesser costs, a more straightforward access, increased availability of knowledge, etc.) there is also a dark side of it. The expert becomes a contested institution while the cult of the amateur becomes the norm.
The huge challenge is how to rebuild new mediators, more flexible, more participative, and not getting rid of them. Democracy is about commitment and engagement, and oftentimes this can only be achieved through representation.
Ballot boxes and dreams
A mature democracy is not about setting highest ideals, but about identifying what is the second best and being able to tell whether it is acceptable. If the second best is too far from ideals, society won’t progress; if the second best is too close to ideals, fanaticism takes place.
Our society is deeply de-politicized: not only technocrats are taking the power, but “tea parties” are stepping in the centre of the political debate. Those are parties or groups of people, without second best options, and that fight within the party for it not to agree with anything with the “enemy”. This breaks party-to-party and party-to-society communication. In many senses, the hardcore of the political blogsphere is made of “tea parties”, extremist partisans that radicalise the debate.
Paradoxes of democratic self-determination
Echo chambers (Sunstein) and the Daily Me (Negroponte) have been side effects of democratic self-determination, with the result that the quality of democracy is impoverished. People that thinks different from us protects us from insanity and fanaticism.
We certainly need to keep a certain distance from reality to see other opinions. And representation is just about this, about seeing the whole picture.
Untangling an illusion
The Internet implies a high degree of empowerment for the citizenry. And, historically, every new technology has come along with a utopia: technology will bring a social change or revolution. But, will it?
There is a common believe that a new technology appears in the void, in no social or economic context. But it does. And that is why the same (new) technology has different effects in different places, or “unexpected” or “undesired” changes instead of what we dreamt of.
There is a common believe that social media decentralizes and democratizes power. But the nature of power is not so: there are gatekeepers and mediators in the Internet. The Internet does not removes the relationships of power, but transforms them. E.g. in the top 40 political blogs in the US, there is also one woman, two hispanics, and no afroamericans. The top 40 political blogs in the US are made up by WASPs… as US politics.
Censorship, for instance, is not any more about governments censoring, but about crowds doing it willingly. Search engines are not really neutral, as they redirect traffic, etc.
We have to acknowledge that democracy is about design: social and power hierarchies have their mirror in the online world. Imperialism is not anymore about culture, but about protocols: we are living the imperialism of protocols.
There is a common believe that criticising (or demanding accountability) and building is the same thing, and it is not. Democracy is not only about winning elections, but about governing; or about reporting injustices, but about coming up with a better social design to avoid/correct them.
Digital revolutions have been more focused on accountability and reporting than on building.
The Internet is based on easiness and trust, and that is, precisely, its weakest point.
Discussion
Q: is it possible that the Internet stops us from a critical thinking? Innerarity: It depends. We sometimes need some things to just happen, without us having to think about how their work; but we sometimes need to stop and think. What we are in need of is to be able to turn the switch on or off, so that we are able to stop and think about a given aspect, and without, in the meantime, being dragged around because of the speed of times. Politics has lost its ability to set up, to propose: it’s reactive and not propositive, thinks short term instead of long term.
Q: are we confusing mobilization with engagement? Innerarity: organization is fundamental to perform deep and lasting changes. What organization? Whatever, but organization.
Q: has the Internet been able to engage more participants in politics? Innerarity: the network has sometimes provided an illusory activism, where the activist believes that they are having a deep impact and the truth they are having not.
Antoni Gutiérrez-Rubí: so, the Internet is a menace for politicians and they should fight against it? Innerarity: it definitely is not, the Internet can help in doing better politics. The problem with politics and the Internet is usually on the politicians’ side.
Ismael Peña-López: what will be easier: to transform the actual institutions (parliaments, parties, schools and universities, etc.) or to substitute the with brand new ones? Innerarity: renewal is a must, that is out of question. Or parliaments become spaces for reflection, or they will legislate about the past, about past problems. But we’d rather update the institutions we have than try and substitute them with new ones: the cost might be higher and no one says traditional institutions could not be transformed.
On January 12, 2012, I spoke at a research seminar on how to benefit from the use of social media to enhance research, both in the stage of being aware of the advancement of one’s discipline, and in the stage of diffusing one’s own research production.
The seminar had three different parts.
During the first part, I provided an introduction to social media, where I mainly explained the main ways that information can be shared (and, thus, also monitored): RSS feeds, widgets and open APIs. Put short, RSS feeds share preset bits of information (e.g. an article, a list of articles, etc.), widgets share preset bits of information plus a preset way of presenting it (a list of last tweets you can embed on a website, a like button, etc.) and open APIs allow an external user to ask a database for customized collections of data (e.g. put on a map the last tweets on a given subject).
During the second part — the core of the seminar — I went through an imaginary typical research process, from the moment one has an idea that wants to explore until the research is over and a research output can be presented. I draw two parallel timelines where I complemented the traditional way of doing research (on the right in the presentation) and how this could be enhanced with social media (on the left in the presentation). I stressed the idea that social media is a complement and never a substitute of the traditional ways of doing research. That is, tweeting about a topic or writing on an academic blog should not stop anyone from attending conferences or writing academic papers.
The last part of the seminar was a debate about the pros and cons of using social media to do research.
There are four points I would like to highlight from that debate and that were directly or indirectly asked to me during our talk.
What is the basic, fundamental tool: RSS feeds. Period. It is for me very important to be aware of the fact that, with the help of RSS feeds, you don’t have to look for information, but information will get to you. And this is a significant leap in reaching higher stages of efficiency and efficacy in managing information.
If you are a knowledge worker and you are not present in the information landscape, you are not. Having a personal/research group/research project website is not an option, but a must.
Where to start from? It depends. Begin with a part of your research. If you are in the stage of gathering information, set up a monitoring/listening strategy: identify your actors and subscribe to their blogs, twitter accounts, slideshare accounts, etc. If you are in the stage of diffusing your research production, set up a diffusion strategy, upload your papers and slides, comment on others’ websites (pointing back to yours, etc.). Managing efficiently your bibliography (i.e. with a bibliographic manager) is also a way to begin managing your own information/knowledge.
Think digital, be digital. e-Research is not about adding a digital layer, and, thus, adding an extra amount of work, but about changing your working paradigm, about levering all the work you are already doing on digital support.
Following you can find and download the slides I used. You can also download a book chapter where I explain in detail the building of a Personal Research Portal. There is a collection I maintain, The Personal Research Portal: related works which gathers everything I have written or said about this topic.
Slides as a PDF:
Peña-López, I. (2011). e-Research: social media for social sciences. Research seminar at the Open University of Catalonia. January 12, 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.
