elearning_label_learning_and_society
TRAILER: Tagging, recognition and acknowledgment of informal learning experiences
This paper appears in the post-proceedings of The International Symposium on Computers in Education (SIIE 2012) in IEEE Xplore.
The evolution of new technology and its increasing use, have for some years been making the existence of informal learning more and more transparent, especially among young and older adults in both Higher Education and workplace contexts.
However, the nature of formal and non-formal, course-based, approaches to learning has made it hard to accommodate these informal processes satisfactorily, and although technology bring us near to the solution, it has not yet achieved.
TRAILER project aims to address this problem by developing a tool for the management of competences and skills acquired through informal learning experiences, both from the perspective of the user and the institution or company. This paper describes the research and development main lines of this project.
Call for interest - an OER for training teacher trainers
The International Council for Open and Distance Education (ICDE) invites expressions of interest for producing courseware in the form of an open educational resource for training teacher trainers in high quality open, distance and online learning. The target group for this call is an institution or consortium of actors/ institutions and the initial focus of the project is Africa.
Open, distance and online learning is rapidly expanding in universities and colleges in Africa and Asia, but faculty training has not caught up with the speed of development. According to the African Union Commission, the number of new teachers required in Africa by the year 2015 is estimated to be 3.6 million.
Online training using OERs will facilitate mass training of teacher trainers, which again will facilitate trained teachers in filling the huge gap in demand for educators in Africa. By using OERs, courseware can be adapted to different cultures and languages.
The OER/ courseware to receive an ICDE grant should focus on the needs of teacher trainers to deliver high quality faculty training in open and distance/ online learning. The first regional area of priority should be Africa. A regional focus on Asia will be considered when the project has delivered.
The expressions of interest must be submitted to the ICDE Secretariat, icde@icde.org by Friday 31 May 2013. ICDE will invite a smaller selection of applicants to deliver a bid in the form of a project proposal. One successful bidder will be invited to enter into a contract with ICDE. The value of the grant is USD 8,500.
ICERI2013 (6th International Conference of Education, Research and Innovation)
You are invited to participate in ICERI2013 (6th International Conference of Education, Research and Innovation). It will be held in Seville (Spain) on the 18th, 19th and 20th of November 2013.
It will be the best opportunity to present and share your experiences in the fields of Education, Research and Innovation in a multicultural and enriching atmosphere.
The attendance of 700 participants from more than 75 countries is expected.
There will be 3 presentation modalities: Oral, Poster or Virtual.
The deadline for abstracts submission is July 11th, 2013.
Abstracts should be submitted on-line at http://www.iceri2013.org/online_submission
For more information about the conference and its venue, you can visit our website www.iceri2013.org
Tools for Monitoring Urban Integration: UNITE Project
The UniteEurope project provides Social Media tools and makes software available to policymakers working on integaration of third-country nationals. Users of the UniteEurope tool can save, monitor and track specific integration cases to measure impact and to predict the effect of future decisions.
UniteEurope takes citizen generated content, mass data related to integration issues, and existing platforms, but then acts as an intelligent filter. Its aggregation architecture delivers relevant information for policy makers to support sustainable social integration.
Its grid model with multi-layer logic patterns is used for consistent categorisation of relevant integration areas (e.g. education, business, culture) in cities. Coherent layers with multilingual semantic tags, significant sources and parameters form the basis of this tool, and are supported with information on web-based dashboards and intuitive visualisations.
Additionally, identified target groups and policy makers at a European level are provided with aggregated data and key figures to monitor urban integration in Europe and identify good practices for specific areas of integration. UniteEurope supports operational integration measures and strategic policy development at regional and pan-European level.
The UniteEurope team consists of system architects, software developers, E-Government, Social Media and integration experts from leading universities, competence centres, companies and three European cities considering integration an agenda priority.
The Dutch Digitally Skilled & Digitally Safe programme publishes its work plan for 2013
The Dutch programme Digitally Skilled & Digitally Safe aims to enhance the digital skills of the labour force.
Since 2009 public institutions and the business community collaborate within the programme following two lines: Digital skills of the labour force (Digitally Skilled) and Internet safety (Digitally Safe), targeting future employees, working people and jobseekers between 15 and 64 years old in order to enhance the innovation capacity and productivity of the Dutch economy.
The work plan for the year 2013 describes the strategy, approach and activities of Digitally Skilled and Digitally Safe for the upcoming months. Each line of the programme has its own goals, own results envisaged, own activities and own necessary and desired public-private collaboration.
Portal of Hungarian Educators
The Portal of Hungarian Educators aims to collect, organise and give access to online resources relevant and useful for teaching, educational innovation and research.
The website collects Hungarian and also foreign resources, offering detailed information about vocational training, pedagogical journals, and children’s literature and education management, among other subjects.
The portal is developed by OKPM, Hungary’s National Educational Library and Museum, an information centre and research institution also in charge of coordinating the educational and school libraries across the country.
The Digital Scholar: How Technology Is Transforming Scholarly Practice
Martin Weller, Professor of Educational Technology at the Open University (UK), explores how new technologies are affecting the scholarly practice.
While industries such as music, newspapers, film and publishing have seen radical changes in their business models and practices as a direct result of new technologies, higher education has so far resisted the wholesale changes seen elsewhere. However, a gradual and fundamental shift in the practice of academics is taking place.
Every aspect of scholarly practice is seeing changes effected by the adoption and possibilities of new technologies. “The Digital Scholar: How Technology Is Transforming Scholarly Practice” explores these changes, their implications for higher education, the possibilities for new forms of scholarly practice and what lessons can be drawn from other sectors.
If we open it will they come? Towards a new OER Logic Model
The paper “If we open it will they come? Towards a new OER Logic Model” presents the result of a multilingual empirical survey on the ‘micro level factors’ of using, creating sharing and reusing open educational resources (OER).
Authored by Dr Ulf-Daniel Ehler, Professor for Educational Management and Lifelong Learning at Baden-Wurttemberg Cooperative State University, the paper emerges from the assumption that current models of OER integration are often lacking factors to support the creation of a sustainable open educational practice culture in organisations.
Micro level factors for integration of OER into teaching and learning on basis of the results of an empirical survey are presented and interpreted. They are used to enhance the OER logic model(s) into an “enhanced OER logic model” which, in addition to create equalized access, is capable of creating a culture of open educational practices as well.
wiki4HE research project
Wiki for Higher Education (wiki4HE) is a research project being carried out by Spanish researchers aiming to analyse the use of Internet open content for university teaching and explore and propose new ways for using these resources in learning processes.
wiki4HE will specifically examine the educational uses of one of the most important open repositories of knowledge nowadays, Wikipedia, and explore the attitudes and perceptions of university teachers towards this virtual collaborative encyclopaedia (and open resources in general).
The expected outcomes of the project are a clear understanding of the perception, attitudes and uses of Wikipedia by university faculty and the identification of factors influencing these perceptions and practices. Moreover, taking into account this information, wiki4HE will produce a catalogue of educational practices and tutorials involving the use of Wikipedia, which teachers and university staff will be able to adapt to suit their needs and their pedagogical orientations.
Finally a set of recommendations will be drafted in order to help any university teacher to design, plan and implement new teaching practices using open resources in the Internet.
Building an open social learning community around a DSpace repository on statistics
Learning Object Repositories (LORs) addressing content management and preservation have the positive collaterals of institutional positioning and dissemination, but their main benefit is the empowerment of interest-centred learning communities: the LOR provides the learner interaction with the LOs, but also with other learners and teachers.
“Building an open social learning community around a DSpace repository on statistics” was a conference delivered by Cesar Córcoles, Julià Minguillón and Brian Lamb at the 4th International Conference on Open Repositories, in Atlanta (USA) on May 2009. The text explains how the Open University of Catalonia (UOC) has built a LOR combining DSpace with Delicious.
