ICTlogy

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Tag adding now added to the platform — and not as a plugin.

Please let me know if anything is not working fine. Thank you.

Julià Minguillón draws some conclusions (that I adapt too):

The web is changing (us): from centralized information crunching to distributed personal presence, in a pervasive networked environment.

Learning happens everywhere, and in the space between — in part thanks to new (mobile) devices — and accordingly learning spaces must adapt.

Institutions are far behind users, but not all users are 2.0 yet.

2.0 is:

• much more than technology
• a cultural change
• doing new things with new tools (not old things with new tools)
• crowdsourcing, innovation, creation

The person is the center. Of the learning process. Of his network. Thus the personal learning environment or space is crucial. And crucial to gather the knowledge that has split outside the walls of the university.

BUT, all this information (overload) needs to be managed, needs to be managed now, and needs to be managed at an incredible speed (of change). The semantic web, personal filters, social networks, technology… teachers! can help in this commitment.

One of the things that can make all this amount of information governable will be the ability to “rip, mix, burn” the found content, aggregating data from different sources, to open the results through open licenses. And, of course, metadata and open technologies.

More info

• Post-seminar site available at the seminar website
• Web 2.0 y Educación (III), by Francesc Balagué
• El futuro del binomio educación-tecnología (I), by Julià Minguillón
• El futuro del binomio educación-tecnología (II), by Julià Minguillón
• Larry Johnson’s Flickr photo set on the seminar
• Phil Long’s Flickr photo set on the seminar
• Daniel Villar’s Flickr photo set on the seminar

Acknowledgments

I have to heartily thank Alfredo J. Charques, Julià Minguillón, Josep M. Duart and Raquel Xalabarder for the impressive effort — and success! — to organize the event and gather in Barcelona this most interesting community of speakers and attendants to the seminar, that enrichened to a highest level both the on-seminar sessions and off-seminar coffees, beers and unrestful nights. To everyone, a big thank you.

Round Table:
Carmen Candioti, Head of web contents and educational Television, CNICE (Spain);
Jordi Vivancos, Head of the ICT Educational Projects Office. Education Department, Generalitat de Catalunya (Spain);
Ismael Peña-López, Law and Political Sciences School, UOC, (Spain)
Web 2.0 and the role of the public sector

Carmen Candioti

Need for new skills, abilities, competences — the digital competence — that need to be taken into account on curricula design.

The role of the instructor as a mentor, a facilitator, a mediator… and maybe even the creator of his own didactic resources. On the other hand, the student can no more learn alone, but in a shared/sharing environment.

Do ICTs favour learning?

• Motivation
• Interest in the subject
• Collaborative work and environment
• Problem solving
• Creativity and imagination

ICTs as a means, not a goal.

Appropriate technology not separate today from the need for connectivity.

Goals of an “ICTs on schools” policy

• Infrastructures
• Technical support services to schools
• “Connected families” initiative to have an online computer at home for the school-aged children
• Strong bet on open content production, accessible — with emphasis in especial education needs — and in multiple languages

Jordi Vivancos

From Information and Communication Technologies to the Knowledge and Learning Tecnologies. [De les TIC a les TAC]

Main conclusions from the Internet Catalonia Project

• Both teachers and students have access to ICTs and are some of the best equipped collectives in the society, but they don’t use it when they meet together at school
• When technology is used is to do tasks that actually do not require technology (e.g. chalkboard vs. powerpoint)
• There is no evidence that technology enhances the learning process or experience: no more learning, no better learning…

Key points for a governmental policy:

• Digital inclusion
• Digital and communication competences
• Advanced infrastructures
• Methodological innovation

Use of ICTs at school is not spontaneous, good practices have to be shared to encourage ICTs use.

A strong will to decentralize power and give it to end schools to self-manage their own resources and policies, but, again, with a strong will to enhance networking both at the horizontal and the vertical levels: among schools, among teachers, among schools and the government, among schools and students and families, etc.

Key competences not only for students, but also for teachers, with the accent on the competences and not the tools.

Ismael Peña-López

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Comments

(Answering to a question) the importance in media literacy of learning by doing: by editing videos, by (net)working in social software platforms and environments…

Larry Johnson: Media literacy is not just mastering the tools, but also, the narrative.

Ambjörn Naeve: There’s another kind of digital divide created between content that has proper metadata and the one that has not. And among content that has metadata that can interact with other content and/or platforms — thus enabling a semantic web.

Juan Freire: Besides legal issues, the role of the governments should be to design the devices, the environments where creators can build content and share it comfortably, and this includes — or should include — also the private sector (not only teachers and students), because it’ll be a need for them in the nearest future to enter the “open” arena. Thus, let’s get them in as soon as possible and not in opposition with other not-for-profit creators.

Brian Lamb, Department of Emerging Technologies & Digital Content, University of British Columbia (Canada)
Brian Lamb: It’s all coming apart

Originality is overrated: Glenn Gould, William Shakespeare, Rick Prelinger… in one way or another have faced the fact of originality… or if there’s none.

Being open is not a matter of altruism, but a good practice for your self and your own efficiency.

Use information as a flow, not like a thing, Stephen Downes in managing information overload.

The power of positive narcissism: you discover interesting content, people by just tracking back your content, what it’s been told about you, etc.

There’s a problem with that lot of different licenses, confusing the user/creator. And people not using them properly…

As long as you use open formats, they can be reused, or used in several ways/platforms. Also, updating is automatic everywhere that is linking/embedding/feeding from your RSS output. Open APIs is just another way of opening your content, but by opening a function that will retrieve a content.

More than media literacy: data literacy.

Need to solve everything, every schizophrenia now? The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still have the ability to act (F. Scott Fitzgerald). There’re some (lots of them) things that can actually be done just without entering in any contradiction or going against mainstream.

More info

• Slides for the presentation
• A bunch of links (an introdution to Web 2.0 and education), by Brian Lamb
• David Wiley, Openness, Localization, and the Future of Learning Objects (33 minutes)
• Open Content DIY
• OCWinMotion
• Social Networking Technologies: A “Poke” for Campus Services
• Send2Wiki
• MOCSL: Making Open Content Support Learning

Ambjörn Naeve, Head of Knowledge Management Research Group, KTH/Nada/Media (Sweden)
The Human Semantic Web – Increasing the Global Organizational Performance of Humanity Inc.

From teacher-centric, curricular-oriented “knowledge push” to learner-centric, interest-oriented “knowledge pull”.

The Semantic Web opens the gate towards the globally annotated information age, in opposition to recorded or transmitted information age. We all become librarians.

Being a generalist (knowing less about more things) or a specialist (knowing more about less things). You have to choose, but cannot be both. The question is: how to solve problems when you do need both kind of knowledges?

We need to improve the representation of reality, to make it more and more simple. Reinventing the wheels, beginning from scratch is no more an option, it takes too long… or it is just impossible to catch up with the speed of change.

We cannot use negative motivations — e.g. do your homework or get punished — in education.

Curricular-oriented knowledge push leads to:

• Lack of student interest
• Life long teaching (or tenure based teaching), instead of life long learning.
• lack of motivation to know why (whitehead)
• decreasing interest in the “hard fun”

Technology helps enabling non-traditional communication forms, support global content sharing, the formation of distributed learning communities.

The semantic web information architecture virtually converts the whole web into a huge database, a relational database of content and people.

The information about the information (metadata): From document based (XML), centralized, to graph-based (RDF), distributed.

Integrate people, processes and technology to manage/create knowledge. Knowledge is not about technology, but about people. And it’s becoming more and more important not to know but to know who knows.

We live in a Knowledge Emulation Society, not a Knowledge Society, is the impression of knowledge we work with.

Ever decreasing attention span: from homo sapiens to homo zapping.

From cogito ergo sum to “I am seen, therefore I exist”, the medial mass hysteria.

The power of thinking is to know what to think about.

Nobody can teach you anything: a good teacher can inspire you to learn. Teaching should be left to computers. People, teachers of flesh and blood, are to inspire, to encourage. Your learning motivation is based on the experience of subject excitement and faith in your learning capacity from a live teacher. Your learning is enhanced by taking control of your own learning process. We have to reintroduce school rights, and remove school duties.

Seven different Knowledge Roles:

• Knowledge Cartographer: constructs context-maps
• Knowledge Librarian: fills context-maps with content-components
• Knowledge Composer: combines content-components into learning models
• Knowledge Coach: cultivates questions
• Knowledge Preacher: provides live answers
• Knowledge Plummer: connects questions to relevant preachers
• Knowledge Mentor: supplies motivation and supports self reflection

We’re living in a knowledge emulation society, and forgetting reflection. We will probably be living anyway in emulation, but have to focus on reflection, on putting content before the form and not form before the content.

Fragmented science and technology, Desire for effectiveness and efficacy; and Integrated human development and wisdom, all combined have the following side effects (adapted from Petger Senge)

• Environmental damage
• Loss of community
• Loss of tradition
• Technological divide
• Complexity of social and environmental challenges
• Belief that any technology can solve such problems

More info

• Conzilla, the Concept Browser
• Conzilla map for Humanity Inc.

Keynote speech: Graham Attwell, Director of Pontydysgu (UK)
Web 2.0, Personal Learning Environments and the future of schooling

We are probably in the biggest Industrial Revolution, and we’re living it [I couldn’t agree more].

In Wales, the First Industrial revolution (1830-1950) took 50 years (1890-1900) to impact education: universal education, etc. In this industrial revolution, the impact has taken place in just 10 years maximum and in a broader scope and deeper changes. BUT someone from the XIX^th century would enter a XXI^th century classroom and recognize it: classroom has changed very very little in more than 150 years.

Bizarre effect: while in the instructional technology debate there’s an agreement that Virtual Learning Environments (VLE) are dead, our schools, universities are probably spending more money on VLEs now than ever. Change… speed of change…

Not technology, but the changing ways in which people are using technologies to communicate, to exchange knowledge.

We ban new technologies at school — e.g. cellulars — because they are disruptive but we teach them, at school, how to learn to use new technologies. How do we cope with this?

Key point of Web 2.0: enables learners to be cocreators of their knowledge.

It is not lack of technology that stops people from using computers for learning, as a survey on SMEs showed.

• Much informal learing using ICT in the workplace
• The main ‘e-learning’ application is Google. Not the VLE (well, normally there’s none)
• Informal learning driven by problem solving
• Learning motivated by personal interest
• Learning usually takes place when it is needed
• Highly influenced by context
• They’re social
• In time learning
• Is it e-Learning? Is it learning?
• Learners structure their own learning
• And there’s many types of learning

These diverse ways of learning do make a difference: you can be guided by an expert (Lev Vygotsky), learn socially through judgement and exploration (John Seely Brown), searching, lurking… And lurking is learning.

Hence, a problem is created: how do we recognize these different ways of learning? We’re no doubt confusing recognition with certification. We should come up with ways of recognizing learning without certification, without exams.

Learning takes place in enterprises:

• where employees have more freedom
• where there’s more change
• where there’s technology
• where there’re networks

Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) might not be the answer to these questions, but they do point the trend.

We need to bring the learners in the process of design of learning but also in the process of the design of technology and the design of institutions.

The role for teachers will be mediating, engaging, monitoring, helping, motivating…

More info

• Web 2.0, Personal Learning Environments and the Future of Schooling, by Graham Attwell
• Sociology and, of and in Web 2.0: Some Initial Considerations
• Teaching & Testing, by Harold Jarche

Comments

Communities of Learning vs. Communities of Practice? Learning itself is not a practice in itself, so they have things in common, but they are definitely different.

My Comments — his answers

Q: What about assessment in PLEs? or even in e-Portfolios, the blood brother of the Personal Learning Environment?

A: Do we really need to assess someone’s knowledge or capabilities? Assessment is actually a barrier for both learners and pedagogists. What about self-assessment?

Raquel Xalabarder reads my mind and states that, outside of the educational system, you maybe need some assessment to give guarantees to an employer, to a customer — e.g. a physicist’s patient.

A: Not that assessment is a thing to avoid, but it should be taken outside the learning process. On the other hand, self-assessment is reflection and thus becomes part of the learning process.