Can German dual-education system become an export item?

The PISA study is often used to evaluate the success of a national education system - something that makes every Finn (e.g. me) very proud of our education system. But how do we know that the PISA study is evaluating the right thing? The fact that the youth unemployment figures hit high numbers in many European countries begs the question - are the national education systems providing the youth with right skills to survive in today's and tomorrow's world? And on the other hand, is the labour market doing its part to provide jobs for the youth? 

The Economist had an article on the topic, namely, it looked at the dual-education system in some of the European countries:

With youth unemployment in Germany and Austria below 8% against 56% in Spain and 38% in Italy, Mrs von der Leyen [Germany’s labour minister] has won Europe’s attention. Germany recently signed memoranda with Greece, Italy, Latvia, Portugal, Slovakia and Spain to help set up vocational-education systems. 

Interestingly, we do not hear often talks about German's education system in conjunction with the PISA results ( results in 2009 were not statistically significantly different from the OECD average, but read this one for more). But when the youth unemployment is discussed, Germany is often mentioned with its below EU average rate.

The myth of an educational paradise also starts to crumble when we take a look at the job market: In October 2010 Finland had a youth unemployment rate at 20 per cent. (a quote from this paper)

The Economist's article offers some interesting insights and recent studies in the field, but also points to a sort of a warning at the end against the idea that the education system alone can do miracles:

Yet the system existed in the 1990s, when Germany was the “sick man of Europe” and had high unemployment. German success today surely owes more to its labour-market and welfare reforms of a decade ago and to unions’ wage restraint. In an ageing and shrinking population, demography also helps, as fewer German graduates choose among more open jobs.

Workshop preparations for "Open Education 2030: Exploiting the Potential of OER for School Education"

I'm preparing for a foresight workshop on the topic of  “Open Education 2030: Exploiting the Potential of OER for School Education”. It will be organised at the IPTS in Seville - and I'm already here!

So, my IDEAL vision on “Open Education 2030” is the following:

In 2030, Open Education Resources are not only considered as content, but people and their networks make an important contribution to opening up education through better online and offline collaboration opportunities.

Here are a few words of my background and what I want to bring to the workshop.

Since 2000, I have been involved with the topic of digital learning resources, back in the day they were often called Learning Objects. I’ve worked on various aspects ranging 

• from  metadata (e.g. application profiles and multilingual vocabularies to describe learning resources, different standards) 
• to issues related with the quality of learning resources (e.g. review mechanism by experts and end-users, rating & tagging) and  
• with findability of resources (e.g. search across multi-lingual federation of repositories, recommendation systems, social navigation). 
• I’ve also extensively worked with school teachers in various European countries on the use and reuse issues around learning resources and on exchanging good practices.

With the usage issue in Europe, the idea of cross-boundary use of learning resources is a less researched area - and in my opinion, one of the most crucial one. We tend to take it for granted that school teachers can, and want to, use and reuse learning resources that are in a language other than their mother tongue is and/or originate from different countries than they do. In addition to lingual and national boundaries, there are also the local curriculum and educational/school cultures that set boundaries. We now know that some resources travel-well, meaning that they cross these boundaries more easily than others, but more work needs to be done to make sure that these resources are readily foundable and accessible to all with a good community structure around that supports the reuse in new educational contexts (see the links below for references).

As mentioned, my vision of education in 2030 relies heavily on the idea of networks, being networked and how social influence is passed through such interactions among individuals (e.g. learners, teachers). Last year, as part of one project that I managed, we published a neat booklet called “Teacher networks”. As part of the book, we also elaborated visions on how teaching profession would look like in 2025.

Some links to references:

• Travel-well criteria for learning resources http://lreforschools.eun.org/web/guest/travel-well
• Vuorikari, R., &Koper, R. (2009). Evidence of cross-boundary use and reuse of digital educational resources. International Journal of Emerging Technologies in Learning, 4(4), 51-56. doi: http://online-journals.org/i-jet/article/view/1028
• Scenarios on Teaching profession in 2025: what does the future bring us?http://www.etwinning.net/en/pub/collaborate/modules/teaching_profession_in_2025.htm
• Booklet: Teacher networks - Today’s and tomorrow’s challenges and opportunities for the teaching profession

Inspirational videos/websites for education in 2030:

•          Sugata Mitra: Build a School in the Cloud 

•          Daphne Koller: What we're learning from online education 

•          Duolingo (a free language-learning website and crowdsourced text translation platform): 

Survey from schools in Europe: teachers' and students' confidence in ICT related tasks

This really interesting study came out earlier this year about the use of ICTs in schools across Europe. I was really intrigued by the issue around the confidence in ICT related tasks. Here are a few bits to ponder...

The survey asked teachers and students in different levels of education (Grade 4, 8, 11 in general education and 11 in vocational education) about their confidence in performing 20 ICT-related tasks.   

• In general, they can be divided into operational skills and social media skills. 
• The survey finds out that 
• teachers' operational skills, when averaging out across education, are at 3 and social media skills are at 2.4 (1 being "none" and 4 being "a lot") 
• students' operational skills, when averaging out across education, are at 2.8 and social media skills are at 2.6 (1 being "none" and 4 being "a lot") . For details, see the paper!!

What surprises me is that students do not estimate having such high confidence in their own skills! In general, and on contrary to what we usually think, teachers still seem to have more confidence in their own ICT-related operational skills than students do! 


Wastiau, P., Blamire, R., Kearney, C., Quittre, V., Van de Gaer, E. and Monseur, C. (2013), The Use of ICT in Education: a survey of schools in Europe. European Journal of Education, 48: 11–27. doi: 10.1111/ejed.12020

ICWL conference, submission deadline extended (May 10 and 17!)

ICWL is an annual international conference on web-based learning. This year it is taking place on 6-9 October 2013, in Kenting, Taiwan http://icwl2013.tajen.edu.tw

• Abstract submission deadline: May 10, 2013 (Extended)
• Paper submission deadline: May 17, 2013 (Extended)

*CALL FOR PAPERS*

The conference program consists of high quality technical papers that are reviewed and selected by an international program committee. Papers are solicited on all technical aspects of web-based learning and related technologies, including but not limited to the following topics:

• Personalized and Adaptive Learning
• Computer Support for Intelligent Tutoring
• Intelligent Tools for Visual Learning
• Web-based Learning for Oriental Languages Learning
• Game-based Learning
• Personal Learning Environments (PLE)
• Computer Supported Collaborative Learning
• Web 2.0 and Social Learning Environments
• HTML5 Web-based Learning
• Intelligent Learner and Group Modeling
• Learning Analytics
• Human Factors and Affective Computing for Learning
• E-Learning Platforms and Tools
• Design, Model and Framework of e-Learning Systems
• Deployment, Organization and Management of Learning Objects
• E-Learning Metadata and Standards
• Semantic Web and Ontologies for E-learning
• Mobile, Situated and Blended Learning
• Cloud-based Learning
• Pedagogical Issues
• Practice and Experience Sharing

The submission web page is:http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=icwl2013.

No wonder teachers love technology! - a nice way to tell the story

This is a really nice way to tell the results of an interesting study.

Mind you, I didn't properly check the study set-up, who was surveyed and how. I was right away compelled by the visual representation of the story and felt like sharing it ;)




Attribution to OnlineUniversities.com 

Open Review to enhance qualtiy of e-learning

I have a honor to serve in the Editorial Board of INNOQUAL, the International Journal for Innovation and Quality in Learning. Why I'm specially interested in this journal is that it is an open access and open peer-reviewed journal!

So now you can also contribute a review, how cool is that? The INNOQUAL inaugural journal will be published in April 2013 and you are encouraged to openly comment on our discussion papers, which are candidates for the issue.

Read the short guidelines here: http://innoqual.efquel.org/discussion-paper/

About the International Journal for Innovation and Quality and in Learning
It provides an international perspective on the theory and practice of innovation and quality in the field of learning at all educational levels and in all training contexts. It focuses on the relation between innovation and quality in education. INNOQUAL seeks contributions which discuss how technology can contribute to innovate and enhance the quality of learning.

eTwinning and citizenship: Panel discussion

The annual eTwinning conference took place in Lisbon last week. This event gathers together around 500 new and already established eTwinners to celebrate the success of last years' project collaboration, to network and to learn new ideas in workshops.

During the last day, I moderated a panel discussion on eTwinning and how it links with citizenship and school collaboration in general, and on the impact of eTwinning. You can find a blog post about the panel at the conference blog: http://conference2013.etwinning.net/panel-discussion-reflections-on-etwinning/.
  

I also co-moderated two PD workshop on Online groups with Irene Pateraki who runs one of the most successful eTwinning Group and with Brian Holmes who had studied eTwinning Online Events for his PhD . I will post a link to the presentations shortly.

Network visualisations of LLP project organisations

This visualisation allows you to see how a number of European organisations (about one thousand) are connected to each other through the involvement in the LLP programmes between 2006-2009.

Below you can explore the data. The first image is a static image and it shows how the institutions are clustered. We can see that there is lots of small clusters and one major one.

 

In the live image below, you should be able to zoom into the image and explore the clusters (note, you need a mouse for that!).

Once the report becomes public, I will share more about it.  In case it does not work, here is the link to ManyEyes: http://www-958.ibm.com/software/data/cognos/manyeyes/visualizations/llp-projects-and-networks-connecti-2.

The future of learning: Get on with it by Sugata Mitra

Hands down, Sugata Mitra is the most inspiring person in education today, as he was yesterday and will be in the future. I have no doubt about it. Period.

I've had a pleasure to see his talks twice, the first time in spring 2008 and the last time in winter 2010. At both times, it also happened that we had some time to talk together. Those talks have been so formative to me.

To give an example, the first time I met him it was in a shady hotel bar in Romania. He was the keynote speaker of the event, and when my colleague introduced us, I had no idea who this small, round-faced Indian man was. I had not looked at the programme, I had not heard the buzz and anyway, I was not expecting too much.

With a couple of moments he had my full attention, he was telling me that he was a physicist  - we were in an education conference! And that he considered kids self-organising themselves around a computer when learning like electrons self-organise around atom's nucleus. I loved the idea! And the next day, I loved his talk! I still have a recording of it somewhere. Some years later, so it goes, self-organising appeared as a central theme of my doctoral thesis!

Enjoy the talk!
Ps. I found another posting that I wrote about him in 2008 at FlossePosse with the recording.