infoDev has published the report of a survey about the state of ICTs implementation in the education sector in Africa.
Some highlights:
Growing commitment to ICT in education on the part of government leaders across the continent. Leadership, leadership, leadership.
Public-private partnerships are important mechanisms enabling the implementation of ICT in national education systems in Africa. Mark Davies also spoke about this at the Web2forDev Conference when he presented Tradenet, and it’s getting a subject on which everyone comes over again and again.
The need for digital content development relevant to local curricula is becoming more
urgent as ICT use becomes more widespread. Surprisingly, there’s few mentions to initiatives such as Creative Commons and no mentions at all...
Akiko Hemmi, Sian Bayne, Ray Land
Research methods for Web 2.0 practices: investigating e-learning using Web 2.0 in higher education
The importance of social context when writing/contributing to a wiki, e.g. others’ consent to be written about. Same, even more, when concerning changing others’ writings.
Second Life seems more suitable for informal chat than for exchange/creation of information and knowledge. Indeed, it is not a really reliable tool at this stage.
Identity issues in Second Life and Facebook and how you present your self (Goffman) in virtual realities.
Paolo Lattanzio, Mauro Sandrini
e-learning and web 2.0 – learning spaces for people or machines
The Web 2.0 is not, as it changes and evolves along time by using it.
Possibilities of strong personalization of...
David Cummings
Personalised Learning, Foucault and the Web 2.0 Revolution
Shift to student centered learning.
Learning management systems still have the instructor at its center, with the student never really interacting with the teacher nor other students. LMSs lock things out: if you’re not logged, you cannot access. Not meant for community teaching. You can’t have spontaneity, it’s a frozen space.
What do we want for our students? To be creative, flexible, student generated, collaborative, engaged, etc.
Digital identity mapping.
What about the Personal Learning Environment?
Instant messaging vs. chat
Collaboration not directed learning
Online communities that look like real communities
Students’ ability to create peer groups from other institutions
Ability to...
Erkki Sutinen
Can an ICT professional be trained to spark innovation? Background for a contextualized ICT undergraduate program at Tumaini University, Iringa, Tanzania
EdTechΔ research group, focusing on educational technology creation, under these premises:
Making a difference in action
Triangulation in research
Multiple perspective in development
Bidirectional partnerships
How come does our education system train professionals who can design an architecture to meet the needs written in a specification, for making existing processes more efficient, but not experts who can creatively, critically and supportingly talk with their customers and identify their real needs?
New project in the ICT undergraduate program at Tumaini University, Iringa, Tanzania, to make the students re-link...
Evelyn Kigozi Kahiigi
Exploring the e-learning state of art
Evelyn begins by describing an overview about the fundamentals of e-Learning
Main challenges of e-Learning
Lack of technical skills
lack of time management skills
Credibility of e-learning
Integration of emerging tech
Digital Divide
lack of policies and strategies
Increasing dropout rate
To explain the why of failures (and successes in e-learning for development), Hypothesis: Applying social presence factors of communication, interactivity and feedback can create successful e-learning experiences
My reflections
Connectivism, as a new approach beyond Behaviourism, Cognitivism and Constructivism, and really related with the hypothesis of the project, as Connectivism is really about feedback, interaction, co-participation, etc....
Marcus Duveskog
Tekkie Kids - A learning laboratory for future engineers
Goal: create an interest in kids for science engineering and technology; and provide researchers with a live lab for distance education
What are the key elements that make a tech club successful in developing positive attitudes towards Science Engineering and Technology?
What is needed to support massification of technology clubs among South African primary schools?
Research method: Action Research
Fun factor is important, and so is competition, but there’s a trade-off between engaging and “creating losers”. Planning is hard, being that some kids are “spoon-fed” one of the possible reasons.
As per massification issues, hub schools and teacher training might be good answers.
How should we...
Lead: Michael Best, Ethan Zuckerman
Mobile Telephony in Developing Countries, by Ethan Zuckerman
Ethan Zuckerman introduces TEDGlobal 2007, which was held in Africa.
African issues about ICTs can be tracked at Timbuktu Chronicles, by Emeka Okafor, or at Africa Open For Business. But TED just focused on Foreign Aid, mainly lead by Bono (see Bono, I Presume?, Africans to Bono: ‘For God’s sake please stop!’ and Bono versus Mwenda (all via Ethan Zuckerman’s blog).
The point should be to fix, before you pour into Foreign Aid, government/governance, so the money goes to the appropriate place/hands. More indeed, investment should go hand to hand with entrepreneurship and infrastructures.
Number of handsets is still increasing in Africa, but the difference (among many others) between blog...
Lead: Ralph Lengler
In this session I will first briefly show some of my works, namely our e-learning-project visual-literacy.org with the periodic table and the VIZ-HALL.
An ad (but also other forms of visual commmunication) which elicits a mental collaboration from the consumer is more likely to be an effective ad. As the consumer contributes in the process of making meaning, he becomes “part-author” and thereby he is moving from adversary to accomplice.
What Makes Visualization Effective?
VizHall, to rate a picture. As a peer-learning tool that it is, is that it requires involvement by the user to make full benefit of it.
Likeability
Entertaining
Relevant
Empathetic
Alienating
Confusing
Familiar
The power of the metaphore, based on intelligence. The problem is that you have to...
We’ll never thank Chintan Vaishnav enough for arranging our visit to the MIT Media Lab and OLPC Foundation, impressive places where to work (or study, of course: actually, a place to learn, either official role you get there with), really interdisciplinary.
MIT Media Lab
We visited Lifelong Kindergarden research group, which as Lego as main founder, and Lego Mindstorms as one of Lego-MIT Media Lab most interesting outcomes.
We there were presented a couple of very interesting projects:
Scratch
Jay Silver
Jay Silver kindly introduced us to the rudiments of Scratch and how to get started on this tool. Actually, I still wonder whether it is a game, a multimedia design and production tool, an educational technology, a collaborative web 2.0 networking social software or all of them....
John Palfrey, Executive Director Berkman Center of Internet and Society, presents his seminar Born Digital at UOC headquarters, organized by the University’s UNESCO Chair in e-Learning.
John introduces his speech as a trip through some reflections that arise from the fact that some people (i.e. born in the middle eighties and on) have always lived with the Internet and digital technologies. Those people live/interact on digital landscapes that do have some specific characteristics.
John Palfrey
Digital landscape
Digital identities, in two senses. One is be present on the Internet. Second, to be able to shape one’s identity at one’s will, as the Internet allow one to.
Multi-tasking: lots of windows open and things being done at the same time
Digital media: all your...
This monograph is intended to help educational decision makers survey the technological landscape and its relevance to educational reform. This monograph is firmly rooted in a vision of education that begins with the learner and attempts to understand how technological tools can better contribute to educational goals. It looks at how technology can promote improvements in reach and delivery, content, learning outcomes, management of systems,
teaching, and pertinence. In short, it is a contribution to global reflection on how to make learning throughout life a reality.
This new UNESCO/AED book, edited by Wadi Haddad and Alexandra Draxler and authored by a good collection of authors, presents some reflexions on how ICTs can help Education reach those that are unreachable by traditional...
Notes from the UOC UNESCO Chair in Elearning Third International Seminar. OER: Institutional Challenges)
Friday, November 24, 2006
Open Educational Resources: legal aspects
Raquel Xalabarder, Department of Law and Political Science, UOC
In principle, intermediaries (i.e. OER repositories) are liable for infringement of intellectual property rights. Nevertheless, there are safe harbours (exceptions) where intermediaries are not liable, provided they pass the awareness of knowledge test. Mainly it deals with knowing you’re consciously infringing the law and your ability to quickly remove content when required to.
Big problem: there’s no consensus on which law should apply to what at the international level.
Three things that the law empowers the author (not the industry) to do:...
Notes from the UOC UNESCO Chair in Elearning Third International Seminar. OER: Institutional Challenges)
Thursday, November 23, 2006
Case Study 2. Massachusetts Institute of Techonolgy. Unlocking Knowledge, Empowering Minds
Shigeru Miyagawa, OpenCourseWare Advisory Committee, MIT
Move away from the MIT.com (dot.com) approach. MIT OCW is, no way, a means to get revenues: on the contrary, the participants are driven by the aim of sharing.
Open Educational Resources: technological aspects
Miguel Ángel Sicilia, Information Engineering Research Unit, Alcalá University
Providing the sources is crucial so things are really “open”.
To manage the licenses, Open Digital Rights Language:
http://xml.coverpages.org/odrl.html
Reusability depends on the context: the more contextualized the...
Notes from the UOC UNESCO Chair in Elearning Third International Seminar. OER: Institutional Challenges)
Wednesday, November 22, 2006
Open Educational Resources: institutional challenges
David Wiley, Instructional Technology Department, Utah State University
Shifts:
Analog -> Digital
Tethered -> Mobile
Isolated -> Connected
Generic -> Personal
Consuming -> Creating
Closed -> Open
How the educational model is being challenged?
Content is changing: the University no more the one and only content holder
Expertise is changing: more and more accessible (out of the University) experts
Credentialing is changing: certifications can be worth more than a university degree [personal note: this brings me/us directly back to (open) ePortfolios, personal digital repositories,...
These days is taking place the virtual forum of the UOC UNESCO Chair in Elearning Third International Seminar. OER: Institutional Challenges.
My colleague Julià Minguillón (and, BTW, now assistant director of the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute: congrats!) pointed the participants in the forum to Carmel McNaught’s keynote speach at Webist 2006, entitled Are learning repositories likely to become mainstream in education? (3.19 Mb)
Her main conclusions are that successful learning repositories:
are developed out of a genuine need within a
community
have a core of committed promoters with
sustained enthusiasm
articulate a clear direction and focus
consult with their user community(ies)
establish a good management process
are open access
facilitate easy addition of resources...
In some ways, this could be called Web 2.0 and diffusion of research (part IV): the article. History goes as follows:
I give a seminar on Web 2.0 issues applied to research and self-archiving
Colleague César Córcoles joins to improve the seminar and impart it again, adding a deeper technological background and broader range of examples.
A review of the seminar is published
Now, Carlos Casado, colleague of both César and me here at the University has joined the team and the result is the article The 2.0 Teacher: teaching and research from the web, recently published at UOC Papers review. I think (I hope) that the output has once again improved, as Carlos added his own part on blogging in the classroom, besides valuous contributions to the whole. Pity is that 5,500 characters is not...
Taking as a baseline Open Knowledge, Free Society, the 3rd edition of the Online congress of the Observatory for Cybersociety will take place from November 20th to December 3rd, 2006.
Five working groups have been created:
Topic A: Policy and social change
Topic B: Identity and Social groups
Topic C: Communication and culture
Topic D: Education and learning
Topic E: Critic and Innovation
each one still accepting papers for submission (deadline: October 30th).
The whole congress is a gem but, if you focus on ICT4D issues, Topic A. Policy and social change is your place.
If I had to pick one or two tracks — choose or die — I’d take these two:
A-6. Las TIC y la cooperación al desarrollo: después de la Cumbre Mundial para la Sociedad de la Información [ICTs and cooperation for...
The 2nd International Conference on ICT for Development, Education and Training will take place at the Kenyatta International Conference Center in Nairobi, Kenya, from May 28 to 30, 2007.
The “subtitle” of the meeting is Building Infrastructures and Capacities to Reach out to the Whole of Africa, thus the list of themes is a comprehensive effort to cover all subjects around education, capacity building, e-learning, development, ICTs, open access, open source, etc.
Call for papers is open until Friday, December 8, 2006. Besides the usual presentations, other possibilities of collaboration are open......
UOC UNESCO Chair in e-Learning organizes its Third International Seminar, being this edition focused in open access and open educational resources. While the programme is yet to be closed, most of the speakers will sound familiar to the open access family.
If anybody is attending too, let me know and let’s meet in Barcelona.
Meeting data:
UOC UNESCO Chair in Elearning Third International Seminar.OER: Institutional Challenges
Barcelona (Spain)
22-24 November 2006
Programme (603 Kb)...
Here come my notes on the Open Education 2006: Community, Culture, and Content that we are attending:
Friday, September 29, 2006
Concurrent sessions
Remixing Higher Education-The Open Content University
Jason Cole, Open University
Curent model: access through subsidy, scale with lecture, courses are products, focus on content, web as an add-on. And there’s a huge difficulty to scale this model, to make it grow. Simultaneous curricula are obsolete. Technology is not the issue: innovation is.
One key innovation: the consumer as creator. So, open your course design. If we look at courses enrolment, there’s an obvious “long tail” effect, with Psychology I being far more enroled than Quantum Mechanics. Thus, redesign Top 25 courses. I you can innovate in the head, you...
The official documentation for the Open Education 2006: Community, Culture, and Content is here:
Program
Program (2.5 Mb)
Final Proceedings (3.4 Mb)...
Here come my notes on the Open Education 2006: Community, Culture, and Content that we are attending:
Friday, September 29, 2006
Concurrent sessions
Open Content in Education: The Instructor Benefits of MIT OpenCourseWare
Preston Parker, Utah State University
Five ways to be compensated:
duplication
distribution
alteration
derivation
exhibition
Benefits of “Open Content”:
Better quality
better compensation for creators (credit to the right person)
more efficient
less expensive product (eliminate the intermediary)
How are people compensated:
traditional methods
suppelmentary goods
suplementary services
reception
sponsoring
adds revenues
Institutional benefits (of OCW):
enhance faculty and student enrollment
showcase student content
offer alumni something more
make...
Here come my notes on the Open Education 2006: Community, Culture, and Content that we are attending:
Friday, September 29, 2006
Keynote sessions
The Technology of Open Education
Erik Duval, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
Learning matters: getting better at getting better.
Open matters: no lock-in but innovoation; collaboration, competition, coopetition; open is where exciting stuff happens.
Technology matters: from scarcity to abundance; clarity of mission is important (what are you goin to do with all this abundance).
Access to all resources. “If we share, we’re halfway there” (Mark Prensky).
The Social Life of Information, John Seely Brown & Paul Duguid
Globe: The Global Learning Objects Brokered Exchange (GLOBE) is an international consortium that strives to...
Here come my notes on the Open Education 2006: Community, Culture, and Content that we are attending:
Thursday, September 28, 2006
Concurrent sessions
DIY Educators Gone Wild: Where are the Instructional Mash-Ups?
Brian Lamb, University of British Columbia
diygonewild.notlong.com
Teacher as DJ (David Wiley)
Aggrssive
The Sakai-OCW-eduCommons Project
Joseph Hardin, University of Michigan
Bringing it all online: discussion tool, tests & quizzes tool, online class support, etc. But how to make it easy for the faculty?
OCW Tool: support for tagging in Sakai, IP status for Creative Commons, OCW repository.
Steps: choose materials, tags, check copyright, create course pages, OCW Review, Export.
Taking the Tools to the Content: Learner Support for OER
David Wiley, Shelley Henson, Justin...
Here come my notes on the Open Education 2006: Community, Culture, and Content that we are attending:
Thursday, September 28, 2006
Concurrent sessions
Mellon-funded Open Source Projects for Higher Education
Chris Mackie, Mellon Foundation
Flagship achievements: JSTOR, DAA (humanities Nobel Prize), MM Undergraduate Fellowships.
Openness projects: Sakai, uPortal, Kuali, PKI|OKI, D-Space|FEDORA, LionShare, VUE|SIMILE|Zotero|Didily, etc.
Possible upcoming initiatives: Student Service System, “User Delight” (usability), Coprehensive Text Analysis Framewok (”Scholar’s Workbench”), Humanities Middleware. All emphasize: services-oriented architectures (Java), collaborative, distributed development, for-profit/FP partnerships.
Core values and visions: service to...
Here come my notes on the Open Education 2006: Community, Culture, and Content that we are attending:
Thursday, September 28, 2006
Keynote sessions
myOCW Preview
Steve Carson, OCW Consortium
To support OCW and OER users, the OCW Consortium is developing an educational networking site called myOCW. myOCW supports blogs, favorite links lists and file storage for both individuals and groups, and integrates information from other web tools via RSS feeds. myOCW will be publicly available in early 2007.
Some materials do not generate enough community so that the interaction is relevant.
Future: based on ELGG learning landscape. Connect people with similar interest, supporting integration of web 2.0 tools. Not envisioned as a primary authoring tool, though feedback/upload of derivatives should...
Here come my notes on the Open Education 2006: Community, Culture, and Content that we are attending:
Wednesday, September 27, 2006
Concurrent sessions
Open Educational Resources in Europe: A Triptych of Actions to Support Participation in Higher Education
Paul Kirschner, Keep Jan van Dorp, Andrew Lane, & Peter Varwijk, Open Universiteit Nederland
Open Educational Resources help the shift from teacher centered education to student centered education.
The European Association of Distance Teaching Universities is presented, specially their MORIL (401 Kb) project.
Then Open Learn project. Supported by Moodle as VLE, there are two complementary sites: the Learning Space and the Lab Space. These spaces should be fed with almos 15,000 hours of materials.
Last, Open Universiteit...
Here come my notes on the Open Education 2006: Community, Culture, and Content that we are attending:
Wednesday, September 27, 2006
Concurrent sessions
eduCommons: Lessons from the Field
John Dehlin, COSL/Utah State University
John briefly explains the main features of eduCommons, firstly stating that it is open source: runs on Python/Zope/Plone. He shows import/export tools, licensing, the workflow of publishing, del.icio.us bookmarking/tagging, multiple languages viewing (through a Plone plugin), etc.
As per “strategic” purposes, on how to begin, where to head, some hints:
Starting from scratch to produce materials might cost more than reusing/sharing
It’s good marketing/branding for your university to show online who you are, what you do
OpenCourseWare enters...
Here come my notes on the Open Education 2006: Community, Culture, and Content that we are attending:
Wednesday, September 27, 2006
Welcome and Keynote
Welcome and eduCommons 2.1.0 Launch
David Wiley, COSL/Utah State University
David presents the upcoming version of eduCommons, the OpenCourseWare management system designed specifically to support OpenCourseWare.
Some features:
IMS content importation
Choose license
Add metadata
Easy translation into other languages within the same material
RSS output
Post to del.icio.us
What is Commercial Use? The Line Between Commercial & Non Commercial
Mia Garlick, Creative Commons
Short intro abut Creative Commons
Rapid grow of adoption (linkback measuring) from 12/2005 on.
Trending to more flexible? decreasing noncommercial, decreasing no...
Seed via ICTlogy September 20th, 2006 at 14:39
Seed is a new non-profit created to foster the use of ICTs in education in cooperation and development projects. In my oppinion, the added value comes in their approach: to help in the design of ICT strategies, instead of (a) taking for granted that the project or the institution’s strategy is ok or (b) taking for granted that the western point of view of ICT strategy is the one and only, and counterparts just have to accept charity (no help, no contributions, no collaboration at all, just charity) without complaining.
Seed services [click to enlarge]
One of the members of the team is Isabella Rega, whom ICTlogy readers might already be familiar with, for she took part in the Annual ICT4D Postgraduate Symposium 2006....