ICTlogy

José Antonio Millán
Digital prostheses in education: opportunity or consumerism?

There are, literally, hundreds of conferences around the world in the field of education, and hundreds of ways to use Web 2.0 tools in the classroom, as a quick search can tell. Almost everything can be used in a classroom. But, why should we?

Thoreau says, in Walden, our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end. So, can we really do now more things we previously could with our new pretty toys? Or are they just distractions?

Teachers tend to suffer from the “shiny penny syndrome”, that is, their attention (and efforts) gets caught by the latest technology or device. It is only natural, but it sometimes falls into technocentrism or technoeuphoria.

Educators should definitely have a critical approach to technologies and just say no to the fast and mindless adoption of the newest technology. That is not being a Luddite, but just do a rational use of technology.

Of course there are pros on the use of ICTs in education:

• Immediate access to huge amounts of information.
• Enhancement of creativity.
• Share and build knowledge collectively.

We have to try not to think on shiny devices and go back to the source instead. Understanding the code, made by people, by real humans, is getting back in touch with what humans intended with the technology they created.

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.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.

Downloads:

Prezi slides:
Peña-López, I. (2011). e-Research: social media for social sciences. Research seminar at the Open University of Catalonia. January 12, 2012. Barcelona: ICTlogy.

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.

Joan Balcells, Ana Sofía Cardenal
The influence of the Internet on voting behaviour: tracking ERC’s massive vote loss in the 2010 Catalan Elections

(A former version of this seminar was presented as a communication at the 6th ECPR General Conference as The Internet’s Double Edge: Increasing Mobilisation and Fragmentation in the Catalan Pro-Independence Movement .)

Data from the Catalan elections in 2006 and 2010 show that there was an important shift of voters from the main Catalan political parties towards (a) other minor/new parties, (b) Convergència i Unió (CiU, the right wing nationalist party) and (b) abstention, with minor shifts from major parties towards other major parties (e.g. PSC towards PP).

Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (ERC, the main Catalan left-wing nationalist pro-independence party) is the one that loses more voters, losing them in benefit of many other parties: other nationalist parties, other left-wing parties, ERC spin-offs, and abstention.

What is the role of the Internet in this vote drain? General hypotheses:

• Normalization hypothesis: the Internet is yet another communication media, where big parties have more resources and, thus, benefit more from the Internet.
• Equalization hypothesis: the Internet is a different communication media and, thus, provides new opportunities to those who know how to manage the Internet to reach out.

Web analytics (Alexa) show that small parties did have lots of visits on their websites. Indeed, Solidaritat Catalana (one of ERC’s spin-offs) had more visits than ERC, and ERC had more than CiU. In many cases within small parties, only the website would provide full information about their policy proposals, implying that people would often visit the website to get what was behind a simple message (unlike major parties, whose messages were given fully by traditional media).

Working hypotheses:

• Exposure to political information online will reduce the likelihood of voting again for ERC.
• Greater exposure to political information online will have no effect on probability of abstaining.
• Greater exposure to political information online will increase the likelihood of voting for small and fringe parties, while offline exposure to political information will increase the probability of voting for large parties (equalization vs. normalization).

Dependent variable: vote 2010. Independent variables: media environment (online and offline exposure), acceptance/resistance of new political messages (political interest and party identification), controls (support for independence, age).

Results

It does not seem that exposure to political information online reduced the likelihood of voting again for ERC, while greater exposure to political information online didn’t seem to have an effect on the probability of abstaining.

On the other hand, online exposure significantly increased the odds of voting for Solidaritat Catalana, as did identifying oneself with ERC and stating support for independence. That is, former self-identified ERC-voters with high online exposure were more likely to vote for Solidaritat Catalana. Indeed, the more the online exposure, the higher the likelihood of vote drain from ERC to Solidaritat Catalana. Thus, the Internet will be playing an equalizer role.

• Online exposure plays no role in the probability of voting again for ERC.
• Being exposed to online political information has no significant effect on the probability of abstaining.
• Being exposed to offline political information does not increase the probability of voting for CiU.
• Being exposed to online political information increases the probability of voting for Solidaritat Catalana.

Edem Adubra, Chief of the Section for Teacher Policy and Development, UNESCO Paris, France
Enhancing the status and professionalism of teachers in the digital age: UNESCO’s perspective

Teachers are a priority in the framework of Education for All (EFA) and Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) implementation. At a global level, the role of teachers has been mentioned in major conferences and reports related to EFA and MDGs. And this role has increasingly been mentioned in parallel with the important role of technology in education, both as key players of the development of education.

UNESCO has five main functions:

1. Laboratory of ideas, including foresight on the future of education.
2. Standard-setter, helping to set educational policies.
3. Clearing house.
4. Capacity-builder in UNESCO’s fields of competence.
5. Catalyst for international cooperations.

UNESCO’s Teacher Education programme provides training and management, advice on policies and quality assurance, information on gender and ICTs, etc. including a Recommendation concerning the Status of Higher-Education Teaching Personnel that was issued jointly with ILO.

In the field of capacity development, UNESCO works in the intersection of ICTs and teacher education, assisting with the development and adaptation of online tools and resources, with a focus on open educational resources (OERs) and guidelines for the effective use of ICT in teacher education, including how to adapt curricula, methodologies and syllabuses.

Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) is also an important part in capacity development for teachers.

UNESCO usually partners too with the private sector to be able to carry on specific projects: Microsoft, Intel, Varkey GEMS Foundation, Nokia, etc. We need to bring the expertise of those who are working in the field to know what is working and what is not, so that UNESCO’s policies and actions are guided by research and real experience.

Discussion

Emma Kiselyova: what can be done to increase the adoption and impact of the recommendations, resources and outcomes in general of conferences and committees related to education? Adubra: Curricula and teachers’ practices are very difficult to change overnight. We have to have a clear and smooth implementation plan, and this is what is lacking. And most of the research on these topics remains closed within the “ivory towers” of academic publishing, with serious flaws concerning outreach and with an arguable lack of effectiveness.

Q: how can we avoid the “westernization” of teaching all over the world? how can we embed in international policies the way of thinking that is not from Western countries? Can ICT be used outside of Western educational context? Adubra: surely governments have a crucial role in “transposing” international recommendations to the context of their own populations. And the responsibility of education is to tame technologies so that they do not destroy, but help in the building of a society.

Arthur Preston: what strategies can we put up in practice to fight the digital divide in education? Adubra: basic infrastructures are a prior stage that has to be addressed. Education and ICT in Education cannot be treated as an isolated matter, but within a bigger framework.

Q: how do we use technology for assessment? Adubra: we promote participatory teaching, collaborative learning, but our assessment (especially State-level ones) still is based on pencil and paper, writing essays, etc. Maybe, instead of trying to organize new assessment strategies yet again at the State-level, what we should focus is on teacher training on new assessment methodologies, and afterwards see how we make them compatible or comparable one to another.

More information

• Report from TWG3: Teacher Professional Development (PDF)
• Brief Papers from the EduSummIT

Two years ago, in Towards a comprehensive definition of digital skills, I depicted digital literacy according to five different categories, being those categories technological literacy, informational literacy, media literacy, digital presence and e-awareness (please see the paper From laptops to competences: bridging the digital divide in higher education for a thorough explanation about those concepts):

Towards a comprehensive definition of digital skills
[click to enlarge]

Explaining these concepts with a single example (that is, all the concepts using the very same example for all of them) is not always easy, so you end up using different examples with each category or concept. Today I just found that single example that can be used to explain all of them.

On 3 june 2011, Brian Lamb, strategist and coordinator with UBC’s Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology, tweeted what follows:

Hanging with @grantpotter and @cogdog at Kootenay Co-Op Radio,
ready to simulcast to #ds016radio for #etug yfrog.com/hss95tdj

This tweet seems coded by the Enigma encryption machine. Decoding it definitely requires much more than what the usual definition of digital literacy implies, but a complex set of skills or competences as the one described above:

• Technological literacy: Easy at it may seem at first sight, many people just do not get how twitter works. It is as simple to operate (“just a 140 car. message”) as complex to understand how it works as a whole. Add to this that you have to be following either @brlamb or any of the hashtags to be able to notice the new tweet. And that you can follow them in several different ways, including different technologies, platforms and devices. Definitely, not that easy.
• Informational literacy: There are three kinds of links in Brian Lamb’s tweet. At least two of them feature “strange” signs (@ and #) and the other one looks (or maybe does not) like your usual link, but lacking the http:// part (not to speak about the www.). Informational literacy is about telling the difference from those different links, what do they mean and where do they head towards if one clicks onto them. Informational literacy is about being able to find out that @grantpotter and @cogdog are two people (that’s more or less obvious once you’ve clicked on the respective links), that #ds016radio is the free streaming station used for the Digital Storytelling MOOC course, and that #etug refers to the Educational Technology Users Group Spring 2011 Workshop. Easy to find out for the experienced user, those last two do require an effort for the unexperienced one.
• Media Literacy: The tweet is accompanied by an image. Its meaning is absolutely related to the information gathered in the tweet (as one would expect) and so it completes the message. Nevertheless, media literacy is not about the image, but about the crossmedia and crossplatform factors implied by that tweet. The actual message is that for you to get the whole piece of information you have to browse at least 4 websites (Twitter, with information about the profiles and the hashtag timelines; the course, the radio station and the event website) and then you have to tune in yet another device to listen to the actual radio. Indeed, the word “simulcast” already warns you that it will be much more complex than opening a book, sitting and reading. Add to this that you can add your soundcraft to #ds106 radio, by using DROPitTOme, a way to operate Dropbox. Oh, and yes, the image was uploaded to a companion service to Twitter, yfrog. Let us acknowledge that this cloud computing thing is a complex one to say the least.
• Digital presence: It is very different identifying who the author or who the people mentioned in of the tweet are, from knowing what is their relationship and what is the meaning of them being together doing what is told in the message. But, more important than that, is what will imply for you being related with them. Answering or retweeting Brian Lamb’s message will tell everyone that you are interested in instructional technology. Following Brian would reinforce that message, and being followed back by him and/or other people from his closest professional network can end up implying the fact that you indeed agree with the ideas that this network more or less share: educational resources should be open, learning should strongly be based on building (constructivism) and remixing and working with your peers (connectivism), education has a way out of institutions (edupunk), and so [by the way, my apologies for the simplifications]. There are many messages whose information is about who you are rather than a transmission of rough data.
• e-awareness: Taken at a systemic level, Brian Lamb’s tweet talks about very important things. We have just mentioned connectivism or edupunk. But implicit in the message’s 126 characters is the understanding of what is a massive open online course (MOOC) or how an amplified event works. Full understanding of the tweet requires awareness on how information and communication technologies are (or are potentially) changing the landscape of education, how the educational system and educational institutions are being threatened on their very same core and foundations, how the roles of teachers are (or should be) shifting from lecturers to mentors, etc. E-Awareness is about knowing the systemic and strategic implications of living in a knowledge society; and, implicitly, that tweet is talking just about that.

Now, those are 126 characters charged with meaning. If a single simple tweet requires so much digital competence, what is needed for living your daily live at full throttle? What for the exercise of democracy and citizen participation? What for health? What for education? What for love and friendship?

Last 3-5 February 2011 I attended the conference Democracy and the Power of the Individual, organized by the Ditchley Foundation.

John Holmes, the Director of the Foundation, has published his traditional note on the conference. The note is not only worth reading as an approximate summary of what was discussed during the sessions, but especially as a good state-of-the-question list of the most relevant topics concerning democracy, politics, governance and citizenry. I honestly think that the paper definitely is a good starting point or a faithful snapshot of what is going on in the intersection of the Information Society and Politics in a very broad sense.

The Chatham House Rule wouldn’t allow me to liveblog the event as usual. Besides, that was one those events where you’re not a mere spectator but an active contributor, which puts taking notes down on your priorities pushing up thorough reflection and participation. There are, notwithstanding, some notes worth putting in order. As the Director has already published what can be regarded as the proceedings, I’d stick to my own ideas and reflections, acknowledging that many of them were triggered by the discussion and, thus, I should not be granted full ownership.

Power: empowerment vs. governance

As I explained in my position paper, I think that Information and Communication Technologies are both empowering individuals to be more active citizens and act freely within the system and, at the same time, are impoverishing democracy as we knew it. Cause and consequence at the same time, the reason behind this apparently inconsistent dichotomy is that democratic institutions have become weaker in recent years: the power to manage and change the system has shifted upwards, from national governments to supranational organizations and institutions thus depriving the former from power, while the individuals are circumventing those governments with their newly accessed digital technologies, thus strengthening their weakness.

(Political) disaffection is but a lack of hope to get to the strings that rule or can change the system, out of reach of their democratic representatives. From time to time, a quantum leap of power, a revolution, is set free and the man in the street can actually make contact with the actual decision makers.

In Tunisia or Egypt, social media fed mainstream media (mainly Al Jazeera) with grassroots-generated multimedia content and thus caught the attention of, amongst others, the US Secretary of State that was pressured by their own citizens to take sides and do not look away from the conflict.

When such things happen, is it easy to see social media as new ways of self-determination and the right to information a most valuable right.

Cause-led activism vs. policy-led politics

The problem with this self-determination that empowering ICTs provide might be that politician action becomes so atomized that once the quantum leap is over, leadership might be difficult to determine and policy making, planning, just too difficult to assemble.

The citizenry is, in this scenario, triggered by the very short term and is aware — or simply does not care — neither of the consequences in the long run nor on the possibilities of political negotiation and bargain.

In this sense, if decisions/negotiations take place just once in time, the negotiating parties have an incentive not to move and to bring discussion to stalemate situations. If, on the contrary, there is the possibility of continuous/sequential negotiation, along time, in the long run, with several rounds, negotiation becomes a game (in the sense of Game Theory) where there is a possibility to plan, to deal, to develop agreements, etc.

A short-sighted-politics scenario plus an hourglass-like distribution of power render information worthless. The abundance of information provided by openness, transparency, crowdsourcing… is useless, a placebo, if it is not aimed at bridging a democratic gap both in time (short-term vs. long-run) and space (national government vs. supranational elites).

From political institutions to democratic processes

This shift from the monolithic institution to the liquid political engagement has some causes in social media and the raise of the Web 2.0.

On the one hand, social media turns “tough politics” into “swallowable politics”, as they make complex discourses more granular, highly visual, and definitely straightforward. Once again, if social media had any kind of prominent role in the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, spread of the message through virality has been one of them.

On the other hand, social media has linked content with people, so that people are bound to their own opinions, images, sounds, videos… and personal relationships 24×7, in their presence or in their absence, as their social networking sites profiles speak for them all of the time. Indeed, this deep interlinking between people and constructs provides a much needed context in politics, in citizen action.

Last, but not least, social media enables emergent behaviours, that is, complex systems that perform collective activities after simple actions. Emergent systems usually create patterns that a wise observer should be able to recognize. While we focus on how governments and political parties should use social media as individual users do, it is highly probable that they would rather leverage the power of networks by effectively identifying the patterns that the addition of individual action creates.

Indeed, transparency has changed. It now comes with the possibility of feedback attached, and most of the times feedback is generated automatically: when one link is created, it becomes part of the existing mesh of content, people and the construct that they both make up. The possibility of emergency is enabled and, with it, the generation of patterns and mass (sometimes mob) trends.

Situated politics

What to do in such a scenario?

The world of education and training is in its way to reinvent itself and is already taking about situated learning: the need to learn happens everywhere and everywhen; we should thus be able to situate learning where and when it is needed.

Situated politics is about providing tools for participation when and where the citizen needs them to carry on a civic action. In this sense, we should also enable, encourage and foster participation or engagement that is tacit or informal. And social media can play an important role in linking both sides (tacit/explicit, informal/formal) of political participation.

One of the most thrilling issues in today’s politics is that we are facing a chicken and egg dilemma in democracy:

• We want, first of all, to change our weakened democratic institutions, leaving for later the decision whether and how social media can contribute or impact on those institutions.
• But social media are already questioning many fundamentals, assumptions and procedures of traditional democratic institutions, thus we need to know how and what are they doing to democracy.

And maybe, one of the first topics we should address is how political action has changed of shape. On the one hand, we have communities originated offline; on the other hand, we have networks originated or powered online. These are two social organizations that have different structures, power distributions, needs, degrees of commitment. How do we try and put to work together communities and networks?