Creativity

The importance of creative solutions for education

In opening the conference, the Minister of National Education of the Republic of Indonesia Muhammad Nuh praised Universitas Terbuka for its work in overcoming challenges in the provision of access to education: “We have to be creative – open and distance learning has to be used as widely as possible to narrow social gaps”.

A personal story about educational opportunity

Hal Plotkin, Senior Policy Advisor in the Office of the Under Secretary of Education, United States Department of Education drew on his own life story to highlight the opportunity that distance education can bring to underprivileged sections of society. On the verge of losing the family home, 17-year-old Plotkin left high school to work as a waiter until a newspaper article about school dropouts provoked him to write a reply, the beginning of a career as a writer and journalist. His formal education came through the US community college system which has no requirements for previous formal education: “Only 5% have real opportunities to enter higher education and among the other 95% could be geniuses capable of finding the cure for diabetes and solutions to the world’s economic challenges – open education is the only tool to unlock talent and capacity and to extend economic growth”.

Investments in access to education

Plotkin reported on massive investments in open education being made by the Obama administration in the United States through the federal Online Skills Laboratory, an initiative to build open resources for learning. The Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training Grant Program (TAACCCT) will invest $2 billion over the next four years in initiatives including free to access materials.

Keynote speaker Duk Hoon Kwak of the Korea Educational Broadcasting System (EBS), a public television network dedicated to lifelong public education noted similar investments planned in Korea for 2012-2015. All Korean students will be provided with digital textbooks by the end of this period.

Access challenges in developing countries

Onno W Purbo an IT evangelist from Indonesia spoke of how 6 million children enter school annually, but only 600,000 graduate from higher education. While learning materials are ever more freely available, the predominance of English language creates barriers, though Google translate is widely used. Students and teachers use USB memory drives to overcome the problems of slow internet connection, while kitchen utensils are used to extend the range of Wi-Fi hotspots.

From a Brazilian perspective, Stavros Xanthopoylos spoke of the challenges to creating and distributing free educational content when quality education is only available through private universities and colleges: “the value chain is based on profit and this goes against what they are about”.

Academic perspectives

Lawrence Lessig, lawyer, activist and founder of Creative Commons, an initiative to provide certificates for the licensing of scientific and educational materials spoke passionately about the injustices of commercial scientific publishing which restricts access to knowledge to the most privileged: “copyright is 18th century rules in a 21st century world”.

Respected academics working with open educational resources including Gráinne Conole from the University of Leicester, UK, and Rory McGreal from Athabasca University, Canada spoke on the role of technology in learning. McGreal advised colleagues to create educational materials for mobile devices first: “a third of the world’s population can only access the Internet from mobile devices”.

Conference website: www.ut.ac.id/icde2011

For information about the International Council for Open and Distance Education (ICDE): www.icde.org/en/about

Contact: Gard Titlestad, Secretary General, ICDE, Mobile: +47 48 10 80 96, titlestad@icde.org

Today is the first working “after” day, and we are tiding up all the information created during the seminar. What we share today is just a tip of the iceberg, still it may be of interest of the participants, those who were lucky enough to be with us face-to-face but also those following it through live streaming and twitter.

Firstly, a few words about some stats of the seminar. We had 86 attendees from 20 different countries. During the seminar, almost 1500 tweets were generated; we will analyze them in more detail. Tweets were promoted and curated by César Córcoles, who took care of the @UOCunescochair Twitter account during the seminar. Ismael Peña was in charge of live blogging, doing an excellent work summarizing each of the talks in real time:

ICTlogy By Ismael-Peña López ( www.ictlogy.net )

Keynotes:

• Steve Wheeler: Learning and Teaching in the Digital Age
• Douglas Thomas: Cultivating the imagination for a world of constant change
• Yehuda Elkana & Hannes Klöpper: Higher Education Curricula, Technology and the Changing Role of the Teacher in the 21st Century
• Edem Adubra: Enhancing the status and professionalism of teachers in the digital age
• Ferran Ruiz Tarragó: The Usual Suspects? Teachers, Their Challenges and Development

Demos:

• Signe Sutherland & David Pitcher: New Learning Team: Time for Creativity and Collaboration in Teacher Education
• Peter Baptist: Towards New Teaching of Mathematics – What Do We Learn from SINUS?
• Hanna Teräs: Using Authentic Learning and Social Media for Developing 21st Century Pedagogical Skills in Teacher Education
• Ichiya Nakamura & Janak Bhimani: Enhancing the creativity of children through the use of digital video technology
• Jordi Blanch i Hughet, Jordi Moral i Ajado & Diego Haro Nieto: IOC: an Experience in Changing Roles of Teachers and Students
• Teresa Guash & Guillermo Bautista: Training new teachers for Secondary Education: trying out changes and improvements

Closing:

• Julià Minguillón: Conclusions of the UOC UNESCO Chair in e-Learning VIII International Seminar

Last, but not least, the seminar also generated some beautiful noise around it. Currently now we can highlight the following, but we expect this list to grow with all your post-seminar activity:

Learning with e’s By Steve Wheeler ( http://steve-wheeler.blogspot.com/ )

• In the same boat
• Slightly dangerous

Grow or Pay By Hanna Teräs ( www.hannateras.com )

• Reconsidering teachers’ roles – how to do it without hitting the system wall?

School Networking By Sigi Jakob ( www.school-networking.de )

• Two days of global learning in Barcelona

In the following days we will be posting additional resources related to the seminar, such as speakers’ presentations, video recordings, your comments, etc. Therefore, don’t forget to subscribe to our blog in order to keep up to date. And, of course, if you have any idea, comment or request, do not hesitate to contact us through commenting this very same entry or our email catedraunesco[at]uoc.edu