elearning_label_learning_and_society
Joel Josephson talks in a TEDx event about the Creative Classroom and other EU education projects
Joel Josephson was invited in April 2013 to give a talk at a TEDx event in Tel-Aviv (Israel), organised by the Kibbutzim College of Education. This British consultant is involved in changing education with holistic projects funded by the European Union.
In his TEDx conference Mr Josephson spoke on the possible future shape of education as a Creative Classroom and how some of the EU Lifelong Learning Projects (LLP) he has initiated or is involved in are using the arts and music to achieve future learning strategies.
“There is much more into the MOOCs than what we see”
Pierre Dillenbourg, Professor of Computer Science at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), is co-author of the article MOOCs are More Social than You Believe, included in issue number 33 of eLearning Papers.
Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are indeed changing the educational landscape, says Mr Dillenbourg in a podcast interview with eLearningEuropa.info, but “in terms or technology and the kind of pedagogy involved, there is not a major revolution compared to what was done before.” The major changes, he points out, are on the social dimension.
“My goal is to show there is much more into the MOOCs than what we see”, he says. For instance, it is already being acknowledged by university teachers that on-campus students who follow MOOCs are better prepared when they take their exercises, “because they have time to digest” the information. This single fact, he says, justifies all the energy put into the design of these courses, as “being better prepared for an exercise is a key factor” for educators.
Professor Dillenbourg also stresses that “you need to be quite self motivated to follow a MOOC”, as these are usually tough and contents are highly demanding. This is for example something valuable that potential employers might want to know, and students should start adding MOOCs in their CVs because “they are an indicator of motivation.”
Researchers on learning technologies should analyse in-depth “the innovative practices that come around what seems a traditional medium”, he recommends.
Creativity in Collaborative Learning across the Life Span
The paper “Creativity in Collaborative Learning across the Life Span” discusses the outcome of a literature review on creativity in collaborative learning across the different stages of an individual’s development, with a specific focus on the use of ICT as a means of fostering the creative learning process.
Although much of the literature concerns creativity and critical thinking skills in children and adolescents, the authors of this article published in “Creative Education” in 2012 analyze the specific requirements and specificities of these competencies in advanced adulthood.
Researchers Romero, Hyvonen and Barbera aim specifically to characterize the capabilities of older adults to collaborate through Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs). The paper also discusses means of promoting the development of creative skills at different ages, notably in elderly persons, and the use of collaborative learning technologies.
Open Tapestry: make your own teaching units by selecting available OER
Open Tapestry is an online educational/ training tool that leverages open education resources to aid in teaching and learning. Instructors can use it to deploy courses through the Open Tapestry platform or through their own website.
Open Tapestry can easily be integrated with anything (any LMS, Google Docs, interactive tools) and provides a scalable search and recommendation engine, where instructors can connect with colleagues and find relevant content.
The platform aims to make finding teaching and training materials simple and reduce the costs associated with assembling instructional content.
SpeakApps OER
SpeakApps Open Educational Resources (OER) consists of a set of online tools for practising oral production and interaction when learning foreign languages.
The SpeakApps openly licensed tools are directed at different types of activities and are suitable for all students, regardless of the level they have reached in a particular language.
The platform's OER repository allows teachers to find a growing amount of activities and experiences to be carried out in their classrooms. Moreover, and since the repository is build in a wiki environment, users are able to actively contribute to the project by modifying and adapting activities to their needs.
ALICE: Creative Intergenerational Learning
Intergenerational learning (IL) aims to improve dialogue among generations through civic participation in common social and institutional spaces, and carry out informal learning of key competences for lifelong learning, both by adults and children. IL has as its goal fostering social cohesion.
Contemporary European society needs social cohesion that is built on the basis of a new integrated and complex dimension of social tissue, where diversity (among cultures, age, gender) is considered an opportunity.
Media & Learning 2013
Media & Learning 2013 is targeted at practitioners and policy makers interested in exploring and discussing media supported learning at all levels of education and training.
Media & Learning 2013 is for all those interested in the latest developments, services and uses of media in education and training. Aimed at both policy makers and practitioners, the purpose of this annual event is to identify policies and initiatives that promote digital and media competence at all levels of education and training as well as to promote best-practice in the take-up and application of media in education and training.
Agriculture Competence
The AGRICOM project aims to establish the first Competence Model for the Agricultural Sector (ACM) in order to strengthen the transparency and comparability of VET opportunities at a European level.
AGRICOM (Transfer of the Water Competences Model to AGRIcultural COMpetences), a European Commission project, has as its goal to enhance the Vocational education and training situation by defining the skills and competences required for the different areas of work, workplaces and workers within the agricultural sector.
EuroSentiment Language Resource Pool
The main concept of the EU-funded project EuroSentiment is to provide a shared language resource pool for fostering sentiment analysis. Sentiment analysis has emerged as a new discipline whose aim is the computational treatment of opinion, sentiment and subjectivity in texts, often available in so-called social media.
Sentiment analysis, also called opinion mining, combines different techniques, in order to extract and identify subjective information in source materials. Some of the main business applications of sentiment analysis are brand and reputation management, social media monitoring, mood analysis, advertisement optimisation or product comparison.
The goal of the EuroSentiment project is to create a self-sustainable and profitable data pool for sharing language resources. The resource aims to be used by sentiment analysis systems, thereby extending the WordNet Domain to sentiment analysis, as well as specifying a schema for sentiment analysis and normalising the metrics used for sentiment strength.
In order to ensure not only the sustainability of the language resource pool but its business orientation, a community governance model will be defined and applied, following the successful community approach of (profitable) open source communities
Application for Android to learn foreign languages
Fiszkoteka.pl is an educational portal that converts the flashcard learning method (i.e. with little pieces of paper bearing information on both sides) into a multimedia online experience.