This book is the third of the trilogy (preceded by Geekonomy and Invisible Learning). This new publication offers a case study that analyzes how the Internet has been used to build social capital among those low income ethnics and migrant minorities. The authors explored how those communities interact through the Internet, and either those practices foster their social inclusion or not. In this framework the authors analysed how the digital inclusion places a key rol in among the migrant population. [The first version of this publication is only available in Spanish].
Here you can download an early version in english [pdf].
[Alain Touraine talking about Immigrants in Europe]
Enclosed the TEDx talk (TEDxPlazaCibeles) and the ppt presented in Madrid. It was good fun and a great opportunity to meet a group of people leading fantastic initiatives all around the world.
Rob Farrow (from the Open Univeristy), short time ago wrote that the “discourse about Open Educational Resources (OERs) has reached a point of maturity and needs to be (at least) supplemented with explicit focus on Open Educational Practices (OEPs)”. Doubtless this is a much more radical idea, which opens up the possibility of new practices, contexts and learning environment (either formal or informal).
~ Free learning to all students worldwide using OER learning materials
~ Courses and programs based solely on OER and open textbooks
~ Pathways to gain credible qualifications from recognised education institutions
~ Pathways for OER learners to earn formal academic credit
~ Administrative: not a formal teaching institution and does not confer degrees or qualifications
I fully support the idea of understanding the OER within a much more complex but attractive process of transformation that can influence some other sectors of the Higher Education as well as other teaching and researching practices. Would that be the future of learning or is just a sign of decadence of the current system?
If this is a topic of your interest and you would like to discuss more about how to (re)think the role of the university in our times, don not hesitate to attend the coming (free) Society and the Internet Lecture Series (22nd of November at 16:00 here at the Oxford Internet Institute). Here an excertp of that:
This lecture will explore how non-traditional academic channels of knowledge generation and distribution are increasing in visibility and relevance on the Internet. For instance, relevant examples can be identified in new facets of knowledge generation (e-science, online education, distributed R&D, open innovation, peer-based production, online encyclopaedias, user generated content), and new models of knowledge circulation and distribution (digital print on demand, e-journals, open repositories, Creative Commons licensing, academic podcasting, etc.).
‘Why reinvent the wheel, when there’s great stuff out there?’ Liz Masterman on behalf of the OER Impact Study: Dave White, Joanna Wild, Liz Masterman, Marion Manton {pdf}
In the above presentation I made a personal summary of some of the most relevant findings that I saw in the last Oxford internet Survey (OxIS) which was recently launched by Grant Blank and Bill Dutton (download report, pdf).
During the presentation of OxIS, in the House of Commons Bill Dutton and Grant Blank explained that one of the main findings of this British survey was the so-called “Next Generation” (aka Nomadic Generation, thanks to an intervetion of Joss Wright).
The report says:
“The next generation user is defined by the emergence of two separate but related trends: portability and access through multiple devices. First, there has been a continuing increase in the proportion of users with portable devices, using the Internet over one or another mobile device, such as a smart phone…
Now in 2011, the mobile phone is one of a number of devices for accessing the Internet that are portable within and outside the household.Secondly, Internet users often have more devices, such as multiple computers, readers, tablets, and laptop computers, in addition to mobile phones, to access the Internet…
Fully 59% have access to the Internet via one or more of these multiple devices other than the household personal computer”.
Considering the idea of the “Next Generation” (much more realistic and reliable than the idea of ‘digital native’) and its links with those who are digital content-creators I think that a lot of commonalities can be found between this work and the “Geographies of the World’s Knowledge” developed by Graham, M., Hale, S. A. and Stephens, M. who mapped the digital world based on the generation (and uploading) of contents. That is why I decided to link both works in my presentation.
Thanks to an invitation of Miguel Raimilla and Ian Clifford to participate in the next Telecentre-Europe Summit in Brussels, I will present a summary of the OxIS 2011 in the session: Impact assessment- European digital inclusion. In order to do that, I prepared this Prezi that is publicly available (downloadable and improvable).
Special thanks to all the OII people who worked in any of these outstanding works.
** This is a cross-post written by Mitch Weisburgh on September 23, 2011 in Academic-Biz.
** 1o days ago, the eBook ‘Invisible Learning’ was realeased with Creative Commns. And we are pleased to say that so far 5,000 people have already downloaded it!
Why is education important? For one, in today’s competitive international labor marketplace, superior education is the oxygen that all potential employees want to acquire.
Modern technologies, like social networking, texting, and digital storytelling, are viewed as inimical to the tried and true techniques of the formal classroom. Outside of the classroom, it’s a different story. Compared to watching television when it was a young technology, kids today are spending more time on the Internet with less supervision. Whatever they are doing, they are learning, but what and how they are learning is invisible to the formal education system. There is thus a whole new environment of learning outside of formal education, including through social networks, games, and searching, with students playing, discussing, finding, and sharing information. The question is not, “Are they learning on the Internet?” It’s “what are they learning?”
Can educators leverage this time and energy to help students learn? Only if we understand that the most significant potential lies outside of the classroom, where students are now spending so much of their time, and if we start understanding the dynamics of Internet usage.
But we need to consider models different from that of a sage lecturing to students who avidly or passively absorb the materials. There may not be one winning idea, there is probably not one learning theory that is correct in all instances, maybe we will need to follow several different possible paths to arrive at superior means of teaching more to more. The goal of this book is to try to unify different learning theories, teaching practices, change management techniques, and technologies to make education more effective, efficient, informative, and adaptive to the needs of our rapidly changing world.
While you can’t deny that schools are adopting software tools, many times those tools are primarily reinforcing the traditional ways of teaching and assessing. The software that students are using outside of school, and are informally, non-formally, or serendipitously learning from, are more attuned to what most of us regard as 21st century skills. Additionally, what is often considered new technology by adult teachers and educators is regarded as the norm (at best) and outdated (at worst) by many students. For example, using PowerPoint slides may or may not be effective, but it certainly would not be considered as technologically savvy by high school or college students.
It’s ironic that now, when there are so many people interested in learning and going to school, we don’t know what a good education is. And it’s sad that, with all the resources and effort societies invest in education, and with all the capabilities of teachers and schools, our education systems do not do a better job preparing students for the demands of our interconnected, rapidly changing, 21st century world.
A lot of what we know, and need to know, is not formally taught or measured. Even though these acquired skills and knowledge are invisible or ignored by traditional measurement vehicles, they are very visible and valued real life. How are they acquired? How can technology help us teach them better?
The book explores the roots of what makes learning invisible:
Technology: Because schools are not adapting the technologies that students are using, the technologies that students use to communicate, explore, amuse, and learn are invisible to formal education.
Actions: Students are spending a lot more time on the computer in non-school environments, often doing much more advanced tasks, and these activities are invisible to formal education
Knowledge: the skills and capacities acquired using informal learning are different from what are demanded in formal education, and so are invisible.
Technical skills: besides the rudiments of learning commands and functions, many technical skills are learned while doing other things, for example when you want to create a video and post it to a social network. Because these skills are not being explicitly taught, they often become invisible to formal education.
Assessment: many of the competencies learned outside of lectures, textbooks, and repetitive exercises are not tested, especially on high stakes assessments, so are invisible.
Momentum: because the different parties in the educational system have so much vested in their existing methods, technologies, and practices, they do not or cannot devote the time or resources to looking at creative ways of change, or eliminating the practices that just do not make sense anymore. Thus, the lack of attention makes the possibility of change invisible.
What is often taught, assessed, and rewarded at schools is memorization and exactitude. But are these the traits that are most valuable in the real world? In fact, by penalizing errors, we are also hampering creativity and experimentation, two of the key skills most demanded in the world outside of school.
Our education system needs to better understand the technologies students are using, what students are doing with that technology, what they are learning, how to better understand how much students are learning and what they are capable of doing. All those interested in education should be doing this with a lens of teaching how to learn, not specifically in teaching specific skills, and with an understanding that learning doesn’t stop at graduation, learning has become a life-long process.
We are preparing students to live, and hopefully thrive, in a world we cannot even imagine today, so we need to redesign our education systems. Rethinking education has three parts, figuring out what we are doing that works, culling out what we are doing that isn’t working, and devising what to add or change.
Ivan Illichproposed, forty years ago, the idea that a good education system lets all who want to learn learn, it provides access to learning content at whatever moment people need it, it provides the means to teach for those who have knowledge and want to share it with others, and it does not dictate any pre-determined plan of studies, titles, or diplomas. How different from the education we offer today, but how close to where we need to end up!
Rethinking education is a job for all of us.
You can access the book (it is in Spanish) here. And you can watch Cristóbal Cobo present these ideas at a TED presentation (also in Spanish) here.
Acknowledgments: This study was supported through the Knetworks project (Knowledge Dissemination Network for the Atlantic Area www.knetworks.gov.pt) and prepared in collaboration with the Socio-Economic Services for European Research Project (SESERVwww.seserv.eu).
This is a cross-published interview elaborated by Àngels Doñate at the Open University of Catalonya.
We were already familiar with face-to-face learning, distance learning and e-learning. In Barcelona last week, though, we were introduced to a new concept, invisible learning, which takes place 24/7, in 3D and through 360°, by Cristóbal Cobo, researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute and expert on digital skills. Co-author of Aprendizaje Invisible: Hacia una nueva ecología de la educación ['Invisible Learning: Toward a new ecology of education'], Cobo took part in the most recent Debates on Education event, where he advocated a rethink on educational institutions and spoke of the need to ensure the recognition and assessment of knowledge acquired in non-formal settings.
Nowadays, youngsters learn 24/7, in 3D and through 360°… or at least they should.
The dimensions in which we move in the knowledge society are huge. It is thus necessary to acquire knowledge in different contexts and to combine formal, informal and non-formal learning. Children and teenagers are constantly learning (24/7), acquiring knowledge that transcends formal education structures (in 3D) and doing so in different contexts (through 360°). That is invisible learning, a form of peer-based, collaborative learning with no preconceived technology use.
Face-to-face learning, distance learning, e-learning… and now you are telling us about a new model, invisible learning.
Invisible learning is an invitation, an open-source idea. I think it is important to consider the implications for education and learning of swapping the stability of the 20th century for the fluid knowledge and fuzziness of the 21st. There has always been knowledge outside classrooms, but now it is more important. We have to think about how to raise the profile of the ever-so-effective forms of non-formal learning, how to come up with instruments for assessing and recognising them. The notion of invisible learning encompasses many authors’ theories. It is a mosaic of approaches for the context of today.
One of the roles that schools and universities have played throughout history is that of preparing children and teenagers to be professionals and members of society in the future. Are they currently preparing youngsters to face the challenges of the 21st century?
There is an interesting case of schizophrenia. It would be unfair to say that they do nothing to that end, because if any sector of society acts responsibly in that respect, it is research and formal educational institutions. The problem, though, is that transformations are taking place too quickly for institutions that have not previously been noted for their versatility in processes of change. I therefore believe that there is a certain discrepancy between the professionals who provide education and the market for which they do so.
What should contemporary educational institutions be like?
As Hugo Pardo has said, educational institutions should be thought of as laboratories rather than hotels. Many programmes continue to prioritise memorisation over flexibility and to place emphasis on accumulating knowledge. Additionally, curriculums do not cater for every need. We need to devise ways of hybridising subjects, skills… and to go a step further. There are skills and abilities which are important in this century but are not covered by formal learning structures, such as empathy and leadership. They have strategic value where employability is concerned.
Should we be looking to make the acquisition of such skills more visible?
Yes, and we have to create new mechanisms for assessing them. It is not a simple matter. How do you measure the capacity for creativity or innovation? At the institutional and national levels, we need to implement new instruments for recognising knowledge and skills acquired in informal contexts. According to Marcia Conner, learning can be formal (e.g. classes), unexpected (e.g. social media or surfing the internet), intentional (e.g. coaching) or informal (e.g. playing). How can we raise the profile of the invisible forms of learning, which are so important? Researchers from the University of Bristol compared learning that takes place at school and learning that takes place at home. For instance, activities are chosen by teachers in the former case and by students in the latter. In classrooms, there is insufficient time for exploration and learning is the intention. At home, there is enough time for exploration and learning is incidental.
Educational institutions ought to draw some conclusions from all this. Should they change their role? What challenges are they facing?
I think there are similarities with the situation of the media, which have lost their monopoly over the truth because their audiences now have direct access to it and can establish their own version of it. The case of educational institutions is the same, in that they are no longer the only source of knowledge. Students have parallel sources of information. With basic infrastructure, they can look for information themselves.
By basic infrastructure, do you mean a minimum technological structure and guaranteed access to it?
Not just that. Technology has been adopted very emphatically. Decisions to speed up social change through greater access to information have been made at various international summits in recent years. The idea was to make technology more accessible to achieve greater equality of opportunity. The problem is that another digital divide has been found to exist, besides the one based on access to technology. According to the OECD, a second digital divide separates “those who have the right competences and skills to benefit from computer use, and those who have not. These competences and skills are closely linked to the economic, cultural and social capital of the student”. So it is not just a question of access. Any help, such as where infrastructure is concerned, is welcome. ICT alone are not capable of magic, however. Another interesting point in relation to the use of computers and the generation of added value is that computer use at home is a greater factor in performance in PISA tests than the frequency with which computers are used in schools.
What role should teachers play in the learning process?
The role of translator, in my view, expressing certain information in other words and transferring it from one context to another. Teachers do not transmit knowledge, they are not students’ sole focus of attention. They are intermediaries, offering guidance in analysing and contextualising sources. It is important for students to have IT skills, but also for them to be able to choose sources and filter information. That puts paid to the advantage of digital natives, to the notion of children having a greater innate understanding of digital technology. They are adept at interacting with devices, but that is like driving a Lamborghini with wooden wheels. Their world ends where Google ends.
So, how should those children be educated?
Based on what we have said, digital proficiency has to be taken into account, but so does the ability to use and understand information, something known as e-awareness, although the term ‘e-’… is used a great deal now. What will such children’s future society involve? Working in different languages, virtual bosses, dealing with a less linear knowledge control process, etc. It is also necessary to educate them from a political point of view, to contextualise everything that happens. That is where teachers play their role.
What challenge does a rapidly and constantly changing society pose for professionals?
That of opting for permanent learning, of re-establishing the idea that students are ignorant when they leave university but capable of managing their own learning process. You have to keep on learning. Nothing and nobody can guarantee that the knowledge you have acquired will not become obsolete. You cannot spend your entire life at university, but you can go on learning. At present, we need diversification with regard to forms of education and of applying knowledge in contexts other than schools and universities.
The last week the OECD released its most updated report with the results of the students “digital reading performance”. This assessment was applied to 470 000 students in 2009, and taken by 26 million 15-year-olds in the schools of the 65 participating countries. Before reviewing some of the most relevant results, please take a look of this curious chart (VI.6.10a)
Figure VI.6.10a shows that, across OECD countries, “students who spend no time using a computer during school lessons perform the best, and the more time students spend using a computer during school lessons, the lower their scores in all three core subjects”.
Intensity of computer use in school lessons,
and digital reading performance [OECD average-15]
A possible explanations given by the OECD document suggests that the “computer use in school lessons have not effectively integrated ICT in a pedagogically meaningful way”. Whichever is the cause, the results are surprisingly unexpected. The relationship between students’ computer use at school and performance in digital reading tends to be negative with a slight curve. (Previously we provided details of this phenomenon in early assessments, see ppt in previous post). If that trend would be representative of many schools, the question that rises is: What are schools doing wrong? Probably that question has several answers.
Just a few months ago, Intellect Technology Association, warned to the Department for Education (DfE) in the UK: “The current system is too focused on teaching students how to use specific software packages and fails to allow for development of more advanced computer skills“. Intellect also highlighted the necessity to embrace a wider ICT skills and greater creativity, where interactive content and multimedia technology should be used across all lessons {Zdnet}. From our perspective Intellect is providing a very significant critique that should be analysed with more detail (not only in the UK).
Lets come back to the PISA study. Enclosed some of the most interesting results that worth a detailed review:
NAVIGATION: “After accounting for students’ performance in print reading, the relationship between digital reading performance and the frequency of browsing the Internet at home for schoolwork is close to linear” (p.189).”Navigation is a key component of digital reading, as readers “construct” their text through navigation. Thus, navigational choices directly influence what kind of text is eventually processed. Stronger readers tend to choose strategies that are suited to the demands of the individual tasks. Better readers tend to minimise their visits to irrelevant pages.” (p.20)
SEARCHING FOR INFORMATION: “The more frequently students search for information on line, the better their performance in digital reading. Being unfamiliar with online social practices, such as e-mailing and chatting, seems to be associated with low digital reading proficiency”
LACK OF INTEGRATION: “It is likely that the low level of ICT use at school indicates that ICT has not yet been fully integrated into pedagogical practices” (p.153)
MODERATE FREQUENCIES OF USE: “The relationship between the frequency of computer use at home for leisure and for schoolwork and digital reading performance is not linear, but rather mountain-shaped: in other words, moderate users attain higher scores in digital reading than both rare and intensive users”.
POSITIVE EFFECT OF ICT AT HOME: “The frequency of computer use at home for leisure is positively related to navigation skills, which is an essential and unique part of digital reading, while the frequency of computer use at school is not. These findings suggest that students are developing digital reading literacy mainly by using computers at home to pursue their interests [...] it is important to encourage students to develop navigation skills and to foster self-confidence through using computers at home, while providing guidance on how to balance the amount of time students spend using computers with time for other activities.”
NEGATIVE EFFECT OF THE SCHOOL: “Computer use at school is not positively associated with digital reading performance [...] access to computers at school is not the sole determinant of performance; students who use computers at school must also develop the knowledge and skills needed to locate and use the range of information available through the computer.”
Other thing that we found interesting was the following definition of high digital reading skills offered in that document:
Capability to evaluate information from several web-based sources, assessing the credibility and utility of what they read using criteria that they have generated themselves. Ability to work out a pathway across multiple sites to find information without explicit direction: that is autonomous and efficiently. These two capabilities – critical evaluation and expertise in locating relevant information – are key skills in a medium in which there is virtually unlimited material available, and in which the integrity of the sources is often dubious.”
Noteworthy that Futurelab, short time ago also released a publication exploring the relationship between the use of ICT in the schools and at home. Enclosed some excerpts of this study developed by Lyndsay Grant (2010) Connecting digital literacy between home and school. Futurelab. Here some excerpts of that study (which provide a good link to the OECD report):
LACK OF CONNECTION:
There were fewer instances of children’s home digital literacy practices coming into the school environment, with one child summing up: “we do different stuff in school like new documents”, emphasising the functional skills and more ‘work-focused’ technology use at school.
[At home] Students were thus developing some cultural and social understanding as well as critical reflection in the context of their own digital literacy practices.
NOT TO BRING OUT-OF-SCHOOL-KNOWLEDGE:
“In some lessons at school, students were frustrated about not being able to suggest different or better ways of using technologies, saying they got told off. Students also said that some teachers did not welcome students’ out-of-school knowledge more generally into the classroom: “if you try to link it [out of school activities] with something in lessons, it’s always wrong and they’ve got to be always right.”
Bringing in out-of-school knowledge into the classroom can be seen as undermining teachers’ authority when it is framed as a question of who is ‘right’, or which knowledge is ‘legitimate’, but for other teachers it is simply a case of working with whatever students bring to a particular task.
After identifying the gap between the ICT practices at the school and at home, Grant states a question that we think is quite important: “How schools could foster particular skills and components of digital literacy?, rather than How they [teachers-students] could build connections between home and school digital literacy practices?“.
Some of these results bring us to fundamental questions of curriculum and how we place relative value on different forms of knowledge associated with different social and cultural groups. “It can seem impossible to completely bridge this gap, and it may not be desirable to completely erode the boundaries between knowledge and digital literacy practices at home and at school”.
:::::::::::::::::::::::
My footnote:
Its quite evident that we are still (after decades of studies in this field) in a very early stage. We see that new literacies are adopted and developed in different (and sometimes unpredictable) ways. The PISA results show us that the impact of ICT in learning is demanding a broader strategy (in terms of skills, environments, outcomes and contexts to consider). Grant is suggesting not to force the connection and synergies between the use of digital technologies in the schools and at home. But he also proposed to: “looking in more depth at the complex and diverse reality of children’s digital literacy practices to better understand the skills, knowledge and understanding they are developing”. Something that links quite well with Intellect’s perspective to ”embrace a wider ICT skills and greater creativity, where interactive content and multimedia technology should be used across all lessons”.
The next week I’ll be participating in a TEDx talk event. This is a thrilling experience and I’m delighted for the invitation. This talk will be in Madrid (date: June 25th 2011, from 10:00 to 18:00 CET) and the name of the TED franchise is TEDxPlazaCibeles .
The event will be full of brilliant people such us Mario Pena lecturer at MIT; Miguel Brechner chairman of the One Laptop per Child program (CEIBAL) in Uruguay; Richard Rowe Chief Executive Officer of the Open Learning Exchange, (Ph.D. in Columbia University); Prof. Dr. Michael Braungart director of the German Environmental Protection and Encouragement Agency.
I have to say that this is not my first experience over the TED stage. The very first one was just one year ago in Mexico (TEDxLaguna), when I was presenting some of the key ideas of the book that John Moravec and I just published a few weeks ago (“Invisible Learning“, 2011, published University of Barcelona). Due to the massive interest in that presentation (more than 15,000 views so far), I decided to translated into English (which was not a quick task). To see the the English version, please click here and then press the red CC button.
Thanks to an invitation of the Ministry of Education in Argentina and the Spanish mobile phone operator, Telefonica, we will give a couple of presentation in Buenos Aires and Corrientes, Argentina. The aim of these talks is to discuss the use of the Internet within and outside of the formal education environment (+ information).
Noteworthy, that the Government of Argentina (as many others around the world) made a significant investment of 3 millions of laptops for their students. So far that Government have invested USD 300 millions (2010) and they are expecting to spend USD 1.000 million during the current year.
It will be interesting to learn the goals and strategies behind this initiative, and particularly to better understand how this initiative is going to be evaluated. Many questions came to my mind after I was told about this titanic and ambitious project. I will be very please to learn more from the argentinians policy maker how they are planing to update their social infrastructure (not the technological one, that has already changed). Michael Trucano, World Bank, point out valuable information in this respect. If anybody would like to read more about this program the name of this initiative is Connecting with Equity (“Conectar con Igualdad“).
Short time ago I also had the chance to collaborate in a thrilling project organized by Wikipedia and Ministry of Education in Argentina (called: Wikipediaenelaula.educ.ar) to create an offline version of that encyclopaedia. The idea of this project was to provide valuable contents to those argentinians schools without Internet access.
