By Ismael Peña-López (@ictlogist), 17 July 2009
Main categories: Digital Literacy, Meetings
Other tags: competencias_digitales_cuimpb_2009, Cristóbal_Cobo
5 Comments »
Notes from the course Competencias digitales: conocimientos, habilidades y actitudes para la Sociedad Red (Digital competences: Knowledge, skills and attitudes for the Network Society), organized by the CUIMPB, and held in Barcelona, Spain, on July 16th and 17h, 2009. More notes on this event: competencias_digitales_cuimpb_2009.
e-Competences in the European Framework: literacies in the XXIst Century
Cristóbal Cobo
Europe is doing pretty well (in relationship with the rest of the World) in broadband adoption and Internet users. But… what do people do with broadband in the Internet? For instance, the Chinese blogosphere (with much lower Internet adoption) is larger than the US and EU blogospheres combined.
Social networking sites have become platforms where to informally develop digital skills.
Digital skills might be related with the educational level, but there is contradictory data to validate this statement. Indeed, we quite often find no relationship at all. What is nevertheless clear is that the digital divide and the e-competences divide have much in common with other development divides.
There’s been a huge concern to bring equipment inside schools, to bring computers and connectivity into the classrooms. The question being: are them students learning more? In general, we do not find any evidence between more access and usage of ICTs and higher performance in education. And not only this, but also ICTs haven’t brought any change at the methodological level, any pedagogical innovation. If any relationship was found, it is between performance at school and access and usage at home.
Indeed, beyond a specific threshold, more ICT availability does not imply higher ICT usage… but, quite often, just the contrary.
e-Competences are meta competences: a compendium of several competences, including their own framework: a long-term agenda, stakeholder partnerships, research and development.
Though youngsters show an apparent ease and familiarity with computers, the impact of ICTs in youngsters has been overrated.
e-Awareness as the most important of e-competences:
- understand the importance of e-competences
- promote a constant update of such competences
- promote a professional use or application of them
- promote the acquisition of such abilities
e-Inclusion: the Information Society does not work if we only support the ones that had the best chances to be educated, to have a good job, etc. And a good starting point is de-elitize the advanced ICT users.
Some proposals for e-competences acquisition:
- Uniformity vs. consistency
- Constant updating
- Do not reduce them to ICT usage
- Validate informal e-skills
- Incentives
Some final thoughs
- The impact of ICTs in education has not been the one expected
- Integration of ICTs in education demands deep changes
- The potential of ICTs to develop a continuous learning is huge
Proposals for policies in e-competences
- Integral adoption of ICTs in education, including innovative pedagogy, teacher training, new learning environments, etc.;
- Use ICTs to enrich informal learning spaces, contextual learning, collaborative learning, blended learning, innovative and continuous learning;
- Forget about instrumental standards, but go in the direction of building principles and standards based on actualization and recognition, related with digital citizenship
- Move towards e-maturity: find the proper application for ICTs. ICTs are not for everything and everyone and everywhere. And unlink e-competences with the number of computers and usage time.
Q&A
Q: The abolition of censorship and other restrictive practices, will it help in e-competences adoption? A: Yes, it would help, but we also have to forget about a 1:1 relationship between people and computers, or that ICTs are going to bring solutions to each and every problem (like lack of democracy). But, yes, of course, it is a necessary condition (not sufficient) that governments become e-aware.
Jordi Palau: sure the new generation of Web 2.0 technologies won’t help education? They’ll help, but the change, the real change, is at another level.
More information
Course on Digital Competences (2009)
By Ismael Peña-López (@ictlogist), 15 April 2009
Main categories: Digital Divide, Digital Literacy, Meetings
Other tags: Cristóbal_Cobo
1 Comment »
Live notes at the research seminar by Cristóbal Cobo entitled e-competence in the European Framework: 21st century literacies and based in his research Strategies to promote the development of e-competences. How to reduce the gap between the e-skilled and the non e-skilled?. Internet Interdisciplinary Institute, Barcelona, Spain, April 15th, 2009.
How to reduce the gap between the e-skilled and the non e-skilled?
Research questions:
- Why does the Knowledge Society requires highly qualified labour force?
- How effective have the IT & education initiatives been?
- What means e-competence?
- How should the coming labour force be trained?
Why does the Knowledge Society requires highly qualified labour force?
In the last years, complex communications and expert thinking have been increasing in the share of tasks performed by workers, while PCs increasingly do the tasks that consist of rutine.
The World Bank’s Knowledge Economy Index is an appropriate framework to measure this shift towards more qualification in labour demand.
This shift has implied a huge gap between what is being taught at schools and what is being needed — and will be needed in the next generation of professionals — in the labour market.
How effective have the IT & education initiatives been?
And though there are plans (e.g. in Europe or the OECD) to foster and assess these needed skills, the implementation is not straightforward.
The European Commission has established three levels of ICT skills:
- Access to ICT
- Basic ICT Skills
- Advanced Use of ICT (Participation+Transaction)
But there is a physical digital divide, a growing demand of e-skills unmatched by a declining supply, a gender gap, half the population are non-users of the Internet…
Who needs digital literacy: age gap, gender gap, education gap, location gap, employment gap. Not new, but strengthened. Indeed, most non-users are due to lack of skills or e-awareness.
Still, self-learning still is the most relevant option when acquiring digital skills. Maybe policies should focus informal training instead of formal training.
Some issues in European assessments:
- The majority of teachers in most advanced countries (Dk. Se. Fi. Ne)* use ICT in less than 5% of their classes
- Students using PC more frequently at school do not perform better than others.Highest performances: students with a mediumlevel of computer use
- Impact of ICT on students’ performance was highly dependent on teaching approaches
- No correlation: ICT access & Øof teachers having used ICT in their teaching.No correlation: Levels of ICT use & levels of perceived learning gains from ICT use
- No clear advances (last decade) that can be confidently attributed to broader access to PC.
- Most educators use technology @ school for administrative tasks (fewer for class)
- The positive impact of ICT use in education has not been proved
BUT, the reason could be that computers/Internet are just used in old ways of teaching, reinforcing old methodologies, instead of focusing on educative innovation and applying them in new ways of teaching.
What means e-competence?
e-competence: Capabilities and skills to manage tacit and explicit knowledge, as well as to use digital technologies in a knowledge-based economy. There are several ways in which this general concept is put into practice or defined in deeper detail: the European e-competence framework, OECD, the ECDL by the Council of European Professional Informatics Societies.
Five stages of e-competence:
- e-Awareness: understanding the framework
- Technological Literacy: confident and critical operation of ICT
- Informational Literacy: read with meaning
- Digital Literacy: integration of instrumental and strategical skills.
- Media Literacy: understanding how traditional mass media and digital media are merging
How should the coming labour force be trained?
- Long Term Agenda and dialogue between education and business sectors
- e-Inclusion: forget the “ideal knowledge worker” but focus in potential excluded. Try to reach e-awareness, beyond just basic digital literacy.
- Standardization: set standards for ICT competencies: definitions, assessment, certifications… Standardization for the mobility of the workforce.
- e-Awareness
- Pedagogical Shift: avoid reductionist approaches
- e-Skills Teachers: impact of ICT on students are highly dependent on the teaching approaches, their skills and incentives
- R&D
Q & A
Q: where do we focus in ICT training for teachers? A: Probably most innovation comes from digital literacy, from the capability to analyse, criticise and assess, which somehow requires exploration.
Q: how do we teach how to innovate? A: a pedagogical shift is required prior to engage in innovation.
Q: where do we put the threshold in what is “sufficient” e-kills? A: it depends. This is why we have to draw standards depending of economic sectors, purposes, etc.
Ismael Peña-López: there’s evidence of ICTs being not a driver of inclusion, but a driver of exclusion: the question is not whether I’ll be more employable if I got specific e-skills, but whether I’ll remain employable at all if I do not have them. On the other hand, is not about e-skills, but e-competences. Skills might vary as technology does, but competences do not (e.g. a competence is going from A to B as fast as possible; skills, which change along time, would then be riding a horse, riding a bike or driving a car).
Q: if ICT in education is useless, because teachers are not prepared or committed, why don’t focus in informal learning? is it worth it? are policies correctly addressed?
Edgar Gómez: there’s a problem of fundamental skills like reading, talking and speaking, that undermine higher level skills.
Ismael Peña-López: why focus in informal learning? why not fix what’s broken (formal education) instead of fostering a patch (informal education)? (note: I’m actually for informal learning). A: Fixing formal learning is really costly — and not only economically — and its success, when there’s some, is long term. It might be cleverer to make technology pervasive and invisible in every day life, and make using it (and learning its use) more transparent and also pervasive. It’s not about teaching, but about embedding. It’s about making irrelevant the computer by using it very much.
More information
By Ismael Peña-López (@ictlogist), 30 October 2008
Main categories: Digital Literacy, Education & e-Learning, Knowledge Management, Meetings
Other tags: Cristóbal_Cobo, e-competencias, e-competencies, John_Moravec
1 Comment »
The Knowledge Society demands that we leapfrog ahead in our education systems, build a new digital literacy, and improve soft skills (creativity, innovation, collaboration, communication, and critical thinking, among others) that could help all 21st century citizens become productive, effective knowledge workers. Educators, policymakers, business leaders, parents, and youth must identify and develop new sets of e-skills and e-competencies to help youth succeed, and build a capacity for success toward the 22nd century.
This is the framework in which the e-Competencies conference will take place on October 31, 2008. Taking place in Mexico DF and organized by FLACSO-México, University of Minnesota and University of Toronto, the purpose of the conference is to identify, project and discuss the e-skills and e-competencies required for success in the 21st and early 22nd centuries
.
I am one of the speakers at that conference and I’m presenting a brief reflection — Tuning personal competencies to the Information Society — on how the Information Society is changing our landscape and how should we be adapting our own competences according that change. Here are the materials I will be using:
Slides in English
Slides in Spanish
More information
