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.

Educational projects based on laptops in the school

Jesús Valverde, María José Sosa, María del Carmen Garrido (Universidad de Extremadura).
Expectations of educational change before “one laptop per child” or “1:1” projects in the classroom.

Evaluation of the project “Escuela 2.0” in Extremadura (a region in south-western Spain)

In projects based on laptops in the classroom, there has been a dominance of technological innovation over pedagogical innovation, without the educational community taking part of the decision-making, and with insufficient support of the educational system to this new organizational and conceptual model.

Surprisingly enough, ICTs tend to preserve the traditional teaching styles, and the “adaptation” stage usually takes quite long, as teachers do not take up on new roles.

Innovation happens without the support of either formal teams (e.g. departments) or informal teams (e.g. social networking sites), thus leading to frustration: only those that work collaboratively, share experiences, help others “survive”. Technological and organizational problems only come to worsen the situation.

Conclusions for policy:

• Necessity to build a community of teachers.
• Training in educational centres, with the help of virtual learning environments.
• Enhance the role of the ICT coordinator with a trainer in the same area of knowledge of the teacher.
• Strengthening of the technical support and improvement of infrastructures.

Fernandez Olaskoaga, L.; Losada, D.; José Miguel Correa (Universidad del País Vaco).
1 to 1 model: An implementation study in the Basque Country.

Evaluation of the project “Escuela 2.0” in the Basque Country (a region in northern Spain)

Prior to the “Escuela 2.0” state-wide initiative, there already was a 1-to-1 initiative in the Basque Country. The state-wide initiative “only” implied a change of model, but not the development of a brand-new project.

“Escuela 2.0” provided netbooks for the kids, wifi connectivity in the classroom and digital classrooms (mainly digital interactive whiteboards).

An initial training was also scheduled, but only consisted in a very small test on general “computer science” knowledge. “Eskola 2.0” (the basque version of “Escuela 2.0”) introduced some more training by programming several workshops. At last, a digital material aggregator was created (Agrega) where schools would upload their digital production.

Eskola 2.0 had three axis:

• A provision of resources: one laptop per child.
• A technological training, based on the TPACK model.
• Digital materials, uploaded to the Agrega initiative.

The teachers of the project answered a survey on the expectations about the project.

The most interesting outcome of the survey is that, in the short run, it was good to get devices (laptops, whiteboards) but that the rest (training, information, educational model, etc.) was negative or very negative.

In the medium run, though, the teachers expect to have the opportunity to follow some training, that there will be some pedagogical innovation, that the communication with families might be enhanced.

Telma Panerai; Gomes de Carvalho, A.B.; De Souza, B. (Universidade Federal de Pernambuco).
Embedding digital culture in some public schools in Brazil: the case of the one laptop per child.

One of the biggest problems in Brazil when it comes to the use of computers at school is cost. Cybercafes are an option for accessing the Internet or using a PC, but still, it does cost money. On the other hand, international connectivity is far from being optimal.

The first OLPC projects in Brazil started in 2007. In 2010 the project got to Pernambuco (a poor state in north-east Brazil). 4,000 laptops where provided to a 26,000 inhabitants city: that was quite a shock. Students would own the laptop, which provided both empowerment and responsibility… and the possibility of being robbed up. The computers were made by the Brazilian firm CCE and were called “uquinha” (small UCA, from Um Computador por Aluno – one laptop per child).

An action-research project was conducted from June to December 2010.

Students quickly stablish a process of digital immersion. The teachers, on the other hand, were anxious and insecure in the pedagogical application of the laptops, fearing loss of control. The learning process, though, was deeply changed: more students attended classes and the way they learnt was transformed. Public spaces were also reshaped, as students used them to access the Internet or study.

Noemí Martín; Cabré, J.; Sampé, M. (Universitat Rovira i Virgili).
Dialogical learning in a digital society: the experience of a rural school in Ariño.

(project in a rural school in Ariño, Teruel, a rural province in middle-east Spain, quite isolated from its surroundings)

How has the usage of ICTs in a rural area? How has affected learning? And kids’ lives?

What means “dialogic”? A dialogue amongst all the members of the community, where goals, means and processes are acknowledged by consensus.

The centre decided becoming pioneer in adapting ICTs in learning and evolving into a learning community. The centre, thus, went through different projects since 1999, ending up adopting the state-wide programme “Escuela 2.0”.

The project has implied new ways of learning, but also new social relationships, new relationships between the two local schools (which operate under the centre’s guidance), etc. Motivation of students increased, as did academic results. Families also were more implied in the learning process of their children, learning too how to operate computers, how to use them to learn, etc. And not only kids learn more, but master different competences that are understood to be crucial in an information society, like problem solving, autonomy, etc.

Discussion

Joan-Anton Sánchez: how can we go from the laptop as a mere digital container to a learning tool? A: it depends on your starting point. If, like in many Argentinian schools, books are scarce, having 100% of the children having a (digital) textbook that is a great improvement.

Joan-Anton Sánchez: laptops as institutional infrastructure or bring your own device? Again, it depends on whether the student already got an own device (and the new one is just an added cost) or the device is but a means to overcome the digital divide.

There is a growing consensus among the participants that more resources should be devoted to training, but not to courses or workshops, but to building communities of practice, not relying these communities of practice on everyone’s good will, but on liberating resources or workload for specific leaders.

Round Table: Looking into the future
Mark Bullen (British Columbia Institute of Technology), Roni Aviram (The Center for Futurism in Education), Norbert Meder (University of Duisburg-Essen), Martha Stone Wiske (Harvard Graduate School of Education).

Mark Bullen

It is very unlikely that the technologies that we might here identify as revolutionary will actually be that revolutionary in the following years. Take the LMS as an example: almost every university in the world is now using it, but has it brought the revolution in education it promised 20 years ago?

[personal reflection: I’m actually teaching with my LMS in ways I could not offline: collecting tons of news on RSS aggregators, collaborating with wikis, sharing with slides (the students’ slides), debating with fora 24×7 amongst a group of 30+ people, etc.), staying tuned also 24×7 with microblogging, etc. LMSs being non-revolutionary, whose fault is it?]

How do we engage the faculty to try and get the best from LMSs? [that was exactly my point] How do we promote revolution within institutions?

Roni Aviram
Navigating through the Storm: A vision for a humanistic ICT-based education for liberal democracies in the 21st century

(based on Aviram, R. (2010). Navigating through the Storm: Reinventing Education for Postmodern Democracies).

We have witnessed 30 years of failures on the practical and theoretical/academic levels. “So much reform, so little change” or “the more it changes, the more it remains the same”. ICT have not made a sustainable contribution to learning or led to meaningful change in education.

So much talk, so little solid knowledge. There is no common language or methodological infrastructure, no value-oriented systematic thinking, very limited rational discussion, limited accumulation of knowledge (just anecdotes).

There should be well defined, systematic, value-oriented paradigms relating to the goals of educagtion and the ways to realize them in the crazy, chaotic, digital world we live in. And a formation of rational discussion and learning processed to go with it.

We need a humanistic vision for ICT-based education, based on the values of liberal democracies: personal autonomy, dialogical belonging, morality. The new humanistic vision should support flexibility, personalization, analytical abilities, support for reflection, infrastructure for exploration.

At the technological level, all of this is feasible. We “just” need to overcome 2,500 years of “Platonic” educational paradigm and the total “economization” of our societies.

Norbert Meder

We need to refocus on understanding, not on information collecting.

Media can be used for problem solving, for rephrasing old problems, for trying new things.

Martha Stone Wiske

Data, information, knowledge, understanding, wisdom. Too much of information is focused on the transmission of information and not enough on enabling understanding.

Mobile and multimedia tools are helping people to get closer to knowledge but, are we paying enough attention at how they are affecting too the way we think?

There are two axis to deal with: long-wide learning (at the school, at home, at work) and long-life learning. And they deserve different approaches.

We must extend our work as educators outside of the school and the university: we have to engage our learners with their learning in a way that lasts longer than their schooling years.

Discussion

Ismael Peña-López: I honestly think that the revolution will not come from us, the insiders, but from the outsiders. Institutions might be able to perform an evolution — which is good — but times are of a revolution. Political parties, newspapers, the entertainment industry crises, and it is not politicians, newspapers or artists the ones that will lead the revolution, but the people who love politics, journalism and culture. Same with education: there already exist things as open educational resources, remixing culture, badges, alternative reputation systems, crowdsourcing, MOOCs, PLEs that are providing good and sustainable alternatives to the educational system as we know it. It is just a matter of time that these new approximations to education are sustainable in time. We can now separate the content from the container, and think of ways of getting rid of assessment, evaluating teachers, credit recognition, reputation, promotion and tenure, research and focus on learning. We should start thinking about education and educators and not the educational system or educational institutions (Martha Stone Wiske points that this is especially true in college and higher education, and I fully agree with her in that point).

Digital society’s changes and challenges, and their implications for education

Rocío Rueda (Universidad Pedagógica Nacional).
Rethinnking digital society from expanded cultura and educational local experiences.

The Information Society implies new forms of capitalism, especially at the informational and cognitive levels. There are different changes taking place in a common context:

• Reflexive modernization, liquid modernity (Beck, Giddens, Lash, Bauman).
• Collective action and new social movements (Laclau & Mouffe, Escobar, Melucci).
• Informal politics in social processes (deSouza, Lechner).
• Economic and cultural globalization (glocalization) (Castells, Canclini, Barbero).
• Cultural and generational leap (Mead).

Theoretical framework:

• Foucault’s Postestructuralism
• Science and technology social studies (Langdon Winner, Latour, Callon)
• Feminist studies (Haraway, WAjcman)
• Studies of communication-education and culture, expanded educatoin (Freire, Barbero)
• Politics of happening, minor politics (Hardt & Negri, Lazzarato, Bifo, Virno)

Methodology: multisituated ethnography to analyze different initiatives/movements in Colombia: NASA-ACIN, Vamos Mujer, La Cápsula, Niuton, Mefisto, Chicas Linux.

Two type of technosocial settings: most of the times, politics determines technology; but some other times, technologies are used as political devices.

Expanded educational practices take place in hybrid times and spaces; the student becomes producer; the community becomes the driver of action, engagement and change. Technologies are not determinant, but determined by social uses. Expanded education practices foster sharing thus challenging the concept of private property, authority, authorship.

Micheál Ó. Dúill (Logios.Org)
Turing Teaching: Primary transition.

Some specific characteristics make humans human: we believe that language is unique to us, but it just happens that Neanderthals spoke as well as us. But they did not had technology or written language. If technology is simple (low entropy) and biology (us) is complex (high entropy), how is it that a high entropy system can produce a low entropy system, thus breaking the 2nd law of thermodynamics? The reason mgiht be that access to low entropy information is possessed by the genes and expressed in the phenotype.

The mechanism of technicity is based on the association of the executive sphere (lateral convexity, cognitive) with the sensori-motor sphere. External impulses are recognized by our low entropy information embedded in genes.

P-Concepts: derived from perceptual experience, mediated by language, Vigotskian socio-linguistic thought. P-Conceptually: square and diamond.

T-Concepts: derived property-of-mater information, mediated by cognition, scientific reality check. T-Conceptually: both quadrilateral.

3 modes of education:

• Neanderthal instruction (P): directly shows concepts.
• Grammar schooling (P & T): uses an external storage of information (e.g. book).
• Turing teaching (T): animation of externally stored information, it is the Turing machine made concrete, teaching tuned to the developing brain. The problem is that there is no curriculum and no teaching method.

John Moravec (University of Minnesota).
Technology and education in post-disciplinary society: Preliminary insights from the Knowmad Society project.

After Aprendizaje Invisible (Cobo & Moravec, 2011), there was a need to explore what was happening at work, especially at the level of nomadic knowledge workers or knowmads in the Society 3.0. Workers are increasingly less tied to their corporation, and increasingly do not identify work with jobs.

We cannot disentangle technology from learning and working and living… so what is learning in a knowmad society? Now, pedagogy is not about teaching, but about creating the conditions to learn.

We have to stop using technology to obscure education, but to improve the human experience, to disclose learning spaces, to foster relationships that are creative.

Knowmadic people work towards the creation of added value.

Alicia Beatriz Acin (Escuela Ciencias de la Educación, FFyH, UNC); Madrid, T.B. (Instituto de Formación Docente C. Leguizamón).
Distance education programme for adults: between traditional education and technological innovation.

Created in 2000 in Córdoba (Argentina) targeted to 21 y.o. learners with professional activities, extended to unemployed and youngsters. The syllabus is split in “modules” which have a 1-to-1 relationship with written modules. The programme breaks the trend towards homologation and recovers some principles in use in previous times, like giving credit to informal training.

The programme is based on e-learning methodologies where the module is the main tool and teachers are tutors or guides throughout the learning path.

Results: high degrees of autonomy, technology appropriation by students, contents as compendiums rather than cognitive mediators or tools. If students took a more active part in the design of the tool, their experience would be much better and their educational process would be highly improved.

Josefina Santibañez (Universidad de La Rioja); Ramírez García, A. (Universidad de Córdoba); Renés, P. (Universidad de Cantabria).
Media literacy in 65 y.o. adults in La Rioja in the context of Spain.

The goal of the project was anlyzing the level of media literacy amongst 65 y.o. adults in La Rioja (Spain) and then compare it with their peers in Spain.

Independent variables: gender, education level, training in audiovisual communication, professional experience related to media, age.

Dependent variables: aesthetic dimension (being able to evaluate formal innovation), linguistic dimension (being able to evaluate media codes and languages), ideological dimension (being able to analyse the values represented by a message), reception and audience dimension (ability to evaluate the process of message reception), production and programming dimension (ability to evaluate productive routines), technological dimension.

Conclusions show that elderly people have a deep lack of media competence.

Discussion

Janaina Minelli de Oliveira: is there a tension between self-interest and common interest? If we foster self-interest or self-realization, are we going against common interest? John Moravec: one thing is personal knowledge, which is about what can one do, and another one is how or where to apply that knowledge. I think those are two different spheres and not necessarily competing ones.

Punya Mishra
Creative Teaching with Technology: Introducing the TPACK Framework.

In technology and education, what do teachers need to know? First of all, that the Internet might be a much more important revolution to education than the wheel to transportation or steam engine to the industry… but let us be humble about predictions. Because it is all about how we frame technology.

Against techno-centrism: It is a huge revolution: the thing is that only two generations have past since we had computers, and a single generation has past since Internet/e-mail came up, and non since web 2.0 tools.

There are no such thing like instructional technology: there is technology that is applied, amongst other uses, to education. And there are also technologies not intended for educational purposes that are actually used in education, because users redefine technologies. This is especially happening in the field of ICTs: only repurposing makes a technology an educational technology.

The reverse is also true: technology also changes how we teach. But technology is not the target of teaching, but content. If you’re not going to change pedagogy then technology use will not lead to better learning. Teaching is about “something”, not about technology. Disciplines teach us to see: knowledge, purposes, methods, forms.

Technology also changes what we teach. Content from disciplines has changed due to technology.

Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) attempts to identify the nature of knowledge required by teachers for technology integration in their teaching, while addressing the complex, multifaceted and situated nature of teacher knowledge. At the heart of the TPACK framework, is the complex interplay of three primary forms of knowledge: Content (CK), Pedagogy (PK), and Technology (TK). As must be clear, the TPACK framework builds on Shulman’s idea of Pedagogical Content Knowledge.

Image from http://mkoehler.educ.msu.edu/tpack/what-is-tpack/

More information:

• The TPACK (technological pedagogical AND content knowledge) framework.
• Handbook of Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPCK) for Educators
• Koehler, M.J., & Mishra, P. (2008). Introducing TPCK
• What is TPACK?

Creativity is crucial, especially when relevant information is scarce… which usually is.

The Seven Trans-Disciplinary Habits of Mind which extend the TPACK (PDF): Perceiving, patterning, abstracting, embodied thinking, modelling, playing, synthesising.

Betty Collis
Digital Learners: Will they surprise us?

At the level of the processes of learning, there already is taking place a revolution on how digital learners are facing their learning. They may also be doing things differently, or in different places, or with different tools, or with different people… just may. But what are the results of this revolution?

New learners are using multiple tools, analogue/traditional and digital altogether, mixing physical and virtual environments.

The tasks that are being performed in new environments are not that new: communicating, asking, discussing, sharing; capturing, labelling, storing; finding, adapting, expanding, creating; listening, watching, reading, annotating, writing. But these tasks are being performed with crucial differences: range, functionalities, fluidity, depth, etc. And learners are making most of these decisions by themselves, not because they were told to by their instructors.

So, we can state that digital learners are following new processes by applying old and new sets of tools, both of them used in different ways. But what about the results of their learning?

It just happens that the results we get from students are highly dependable from the way we assess their performance. If we want different results emerging from different learning processes, we do need to also change the ways with which we assess learning. Indeed, the new different assessment should go in the line of not providing the “right answer” to a given question coming from some learning material, but engaging the student to contribute with more material, with more relevant questions on the topic.

In fact, as technology becomes more and more social, learning is more about learning together, about building a learning community. Thus, assessment necessarily needs to target the creation of a learning community and how much and how well a student contributes to it.

And, as a part of the building of a learning community, an arrangement has to be made to create an “authentic audience” for the projects beyond the instructor and classmates, to get feedback from the representatives of the external audience and make results available.

Keys of expanded learning (previously not possible without technology):

• Knowledge, insight to be demonstrated is specified but in the demonstration the learner has scope to surprise with results.
• Learners make use of the skills they already have in the process of learning
• The product fo the learning contributes tgo the learning of others.
• The instructor leads a scaffolding process: guides, gives feedback, steers, and refers regularly to assessment rubrics so “surprised” does not mean the learner feels lost in terms of expectations.

Some bibliography:

• Poole & Wheal. (2011). Learning, spaces and technology. Exploring the concept.
• Collis & Moonen (2005). An on-going journey: Technology as a learning workbench.
• Collis & Moonen (2001). Flexible learning in a digital world
• Sfard (1998). On two metahors for learning and the dangerfs of choosing just one. In Educational Researcher, 27 (2)
• Kearsley & Shneiderman (1999). Engagement Theory
• Prensky (2010). Teaching for digital natives.