US Common core state standards and OER that travels well

I've followed the US Common core state standards (CCSS) initiative (http://www.corestandards.org) with some interest. It's not so much from the point of view of harmonising eduction or setting the same standards across the nation, but I'm more interested in it from the Open Educational Resources (OER) point of view.

One of the main problems for educators who want to use OER as part of their lessons is to find good resources that match their curriculum needs at the moment. Interestingly, the US has the same problem here as we have in Europe: each state/country has their own standards, curriculum topics and descriptions. Additionally, in each state/country topics are taught at different times, in somewhat varying order, etc. (and I'm not touching the issue of different styles of instruction/pedagogy here). This makes it almost impossible to find resources related to a certain curriculum topic from the different state/country. Why? Because the metadata descriptions on which many of the search mechanisms rely upon (at least in repositories and referatories) and their meaning differ from state/country to another. In other words, there is little semantic interoperability.

Let's take an example of mathematics and a targeted competency that is described in the national curriculum. It could be formulated as "Pupils know the symbol rules for whole and rational numbers". In Spain, this is only taught at the first year secondary school when students are 13 years old. But in Finland, this is taught in primary school when students are 12 years old. (NOTE, this is only an illustrative example, I'm totally making the specs up). So the Spanish learning resource which teaches "symbol rules for whole and rational numbers" is described in metadata using "secondary education" and 13-14 years, whereas the Finnish one is described in metadata using "primary education" and 11-12 years. So when the Spanish teacher uses her search criteria relevant to her national curriculum, she will totally miss the Finnish piece OER on the same topic because of lack of semantic interoperability.

From the metadata and search point of view, the CCSS initiative has  put the finger on things (i.e. curriculum topics) that are common across the states and also helps increase semantic interoperability across the stats. I came across an example of this at OER Commons. They use CCSS in their metadata to tag resources that originate from different states but that comply to certain given CCSS topics. See the example here: http://www.oercommons.org/browse/collection/common-core-reference-collection.

Another interesting commonality that I see with CCSS and OER in Europe is related to my previous work on finding OER that "travel well" (see for example here). Basically, in Europe, not all the OER are interesting for sharing across the borders, but only the ones that are useful to others (e.g. curriculum match). But how do we sort out the useful ones from the less useful ones? The CCSS work has figured that out in an interesting way. 

Now, what could we do in Europe? If you have ideas on that, I'll be interested in hearing :)

 

Concerted effort for learning materials

It is really interesting to see how governmental initiatives are picking up on creating educational material, mostly nowadays OER. An announcement by U.S. Secretary of Education at the Global Education Summit

... we're poised to make the first free, U.S. government-funded digital learning materials—designed to improve postsecondary training in high-demand careers—available for use and improvement. We're excited to see how providers around the globe use and customize these materials for the needs of their learners.

The report that he mentions:
A NEW FACE OF EDUCATIONBRINGING TECHNOLOGY INTO THE CLASSROOM IN THEDEVELOPING WORLD

A great way to recognise non-formal learning through open padges

Chicago is incorporating learning into summer youth programming through partnerships with youth-serving organizations, museums and cultural institutions, philanthropists, businesses and citizens by exploring the themes of Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics (STEAM) learning. This represents the first-ever citywide implementation of a badge ecosystem.

 Read more...

Hypecycle and MOOCs

A good article on the hype around MOOCs

“It would be a tragedy if you substituted MOOCs in their current form for regular courses,” she said in an interview. “But it would be a creative breakthrough if you take advantage of MOOCs and other forms of online coverage to make more space and more time for students to apply concepts and methods appropriate to their field to real problems.”

Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/07/09/higher-ed-leaders-urge-slow-down-mooc-train#ixzz2YpGqlReW
Inside Higher Ed

A MIT course certificate from a "fully automated" course

This is an interesting development of MOOCs - a "fully automated course"!

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), one of the world's top-rated universities, has announced its first free course which can be studied and assessed completely online.

There are already online degree courses, but the MIT proposal is unusual in that it is inviting students anywhere in the world, without charge or prior entrance requirements, to study for a certificate carrying the MIT brand.

...the MITx version has been designed for online students, with a virtual laboratory, e-textbooks, online discussions and videos that are the equivalent of a lecture. It is expected to take 10 hours per week and will run until June.
More

When I first read it, I thought that there won't be any teaching or assessment work required from the teacher, but I guess it wasn't that automated after all.

One Laptop Per Child News report on a downturn of their success

Since 2009, I've been following quite closely what's happened with 1:1 computing initiatives. One reason of course was that I managed a large-scale implementation in Europe on netbooks and I needed to know what's working in the field and what not. The OLPC project was always something that was an inspiration, but also to a certain degree, a worry.

With our project, we really quickly realised that although both projects were working on enabling students' access to ICT devices, our goals were rather different. Whereas the OPLC project was about reading, writing and arithmetic (i.e. replace bad teachers or the lack of teachers in general), our project was not about substituting teachers, but about changing pedagogical models in schools.

In a recent article on OLPC news, the downturn of OLPC was discussed. I found the following passage an interesting remark which fits with our own feelings of OLPC - it was always hard to find any supporting evidence for their really appealing storyline.

The underlying core issue was - and continues to be - that OLPC never bothered to invest in building supportive evidence for its own narrative about the impact of its work. This makes it easy to (rightfully or wrongfully) criticize the project and gives OLPC precious few solid arguments to counter with. - See more

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.

The use of atlas vs. google maps - discussion

You might have heard this type of argumentation before:

"the state of the ICT use in school is so outdated. My kids still need to use an atlas in school to find the Sahara desert, whereas at home they just use google maps". 

Yesterday, while listening to a panel discussion at the event called "Filling the gaps: e-Skills & Education for Digital Jobs - Launch of a Grand Coalition for Digital Jobs", this argument, once again, was used to blame, among other things, the skills shortage in IT industry.

I find myself getting slightly annoyed when people use this type of argumentation. For one thing, I find, they usually are people who make these blanket statements about the state of the ICT use in schools only based on what happens in their own kids' schools. But that's besides my main point which is that both using an atlas and google maps to find out where the Sahara desert is are valuable information seeking skills. Those skills are not excluding one another. Learning various information seeking strategies is valuable per se and should be a skill thought at school.

Second, to bring it back to the e-Skills discussion, if the kid never learns how to use an index such as the one found in paper-based atlas, she might not be in the best place to design or invent that next fancy search algorithm that will beat PageRank by Page and Brin. Until PageRank, most of the search engines on the web were mere indices. Knowing how they work, and knowing how academic citations work, a new algorithm was invented that changed lots of things for the web. 

Third, about two decades into e-learning (or what ever term you would like to use), it's disappointing to hear that people/general audience still understand the use of ICT in education as doing the same old stuff, e.g. using a map, but just by using a digital tool instead of an analogue one. By now, we know that with such e-learning, kids do write more, more often and more efficiently. Which is nice too.

But that's not anything that transforms education. That's nothing that is harnessing the power of the web and ICTs for something that you could not do with analogue means so easily. Think of authentic opportunities to learn about new countries, culture and languages through ICT-enabled school collaboration. The new ways that you can discover big data available on the web thanks to information visualisation and other cool tools. Think of opportunities to discover space and follow up Mars exploration...I wish those were the inspiring examples that people talked about in these rare occasions that the use of ICTs in education is discussed in such panels.  

  

Big Data - not only for the rich

The BBC features a really nice 5 minute video on the topic of Big Data.

Data is increasingly defining us - from the information we share on the web, to that collected by the numerous companies with whom we interact. Intrigued by the sheer scales involved, photojournalist Rick Smolan wanted to see how data was transforming the world.

Here, as part of the BBC News - What If? season, take a look at his global snapshots - compiled in his book The Human Face of Big Data.

This is also a topic that we are thinking for education, too! But for the moment, finding such appealing examples of what good big data can do for education is still limited. That said, it does not mean that they are not worth investigating for! Learning Analytics is one application area of Big Data in the field of education. I'm just writing a book chapter with Professor Bettina Berendt on the topic - more about that in another post.    

Call for Papers on Advanced Learning Technologies, Open Educational Content, and Standards

I have a pleasure to be part of the Programme Committee of this sub-conference taking place in November 2013.

Advanced Learning Technologies, Open Educational Content, and Standards as part of International Conference on Computers in Education 2013 focuses on recent directions for the alignment of learning technologies, open contents, standards and their rising impact for research, growth and societal change. To accelerate this growth, it is important to realize there will always be more than one approach. From a general perspective, two complementary approaches exist. One is ‘top-down’, in which technologies are identified and implemented from the educational and business needs for effectiveness and quality; the other is ‘bottom-up’, in which emerging technologies are utilized in design and implementation of novel learning methodologies...read the whole call

The paper submission is due on May 6 2013, see the link for the entire call.

The scope of the conference will cover but not be limited to the following topics:

• Open platforms, open educational resources (OERs), Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs),and open learning methods
• International alliance for open source, open standards, and federated
  repositories
• Repository and Network systems 
• Technology standards for content, portfolios, learner information, and   competencies
• Life cycle management of technical learning objects
• New generations of educational technologies
• Learning Analytics / Big Data
• Web 2.0 and social computing for learning
• Personalized educational and learning systems
• Learning systems platforms and architectures
• Advanced applications
• E-learning, knowledge management and their organizational management
• E-testing and new test theories
• Automated assessments
• Recommender systems
• Learning content retrieval
• New directions for standards development in the field of ICT and learning

The Open Book Project announced by H.Clinton - STEM material in Arabic

An interesting announcement was just made between the United States and the Arab League:

Through the Open Book Project, we will work to expand access to free, high-quality, open education materials in Arabic, with a focus on science and technology. Our hope is to lower geographic, economic, and even gender-based barriers to learning. Anyone with access to the internet will be able to read, download, and print these open materials for free or adapt a copy that meets the local needs of their classrooms or education systems.

So interesting! In the beginning of 2000, I also worked on an initiative to share learning resources across Europe. At the time, the MoE of Israel was also part of the project called European Treasury Browser. Before the second intifada broke off, there were talk of sharing resources with them, including the Arabic speaking people.

The European Treasury Browser Thesaurus, which was used to facilitate the multilingual search, had been translated into Hebrew and people were looking into translating it into Arabic too. Unfortunately, no one could decide into which Arabic, as there are so many varieties of Arabic spoken in a wide range of territory across the Middle East and North Africa. Apparently, even the modern standard Arabic has many different variations... In any case, the translation was stalled and due to circumstances, I assume it was not only because of linguistics...

I truly hope that the language will be a non-issue for this great initiative! I understand that search keywords are a complex issue as they are out of context. The content of learning material is (probably) different. In any case, I'll be interested in seeing what's coming out.

Last, a great list of people behind this initiative :) I'm so glad that I've had a chance to work with many of them!

I’m proud that so many trailblazers in open education come from the United States, including Creative Commons, the Hewlett Foundation, ISKME, Meedan, MIT OpenCourseWare, the OpenCourseWare Consortium, and Rice University OpenStax College. Your work is already proving that it has the potential to transform the way students learn across the world. 

See the video of the announcement here: http://bcove.me/qh6ebr2q 
and the press release here: http://www.state.gov/secretary/20092013clinton/rm/2013/01/203382.htm

International Conference on Web-based Learning (CfP)

One of the truly international e-learning conferences that crosses the boundaries between continents is the International Conference on Web-based Learning. This year, the ICWL takes place in Taiwan on 6-9 October 2013. In 2009 it took place in Germany, where my paper won the best-paper award. This year again, I'm serving as part of the International Program Committee (IPC) which gives me a privileged access to review the papers!

Abstract submission deadline: April 8, 2013

Personal Learning Environments (PLE): Learning and Diversity in the Cities of the Future

The annual conference on Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) has a great focus this year: learning and diversity in cities of the future. I love the step out from the formal context of learning (i.e. schools, university) and the fact that we now start thinking of the whole city as a learning environment. This allows asking the following type of research questions, for which the call for papers has now been set-up (deadline 4 March 2013)

What shapes can Personal Learning Environments take to support diversity, cross-boundary learning and interdisciplinary transformation of urban spaces? How can we design and implement Personal Learning Environments as part of highly interconnected social and technological infrastructures of smart cities? What technology-enhanced scenarios can be envisaged to enhance learning and diversity in cities of the future?

In general, PLEs are an approach to Technology- Enhanced Learning based on the principles of learner autonomy and empowerment. PLEs include methods, tools, communities, and services constituting individual learning infrastructures or ecosystems which learners use to direct their own learning and pursue their educational goals.

This year, I'm honored to serve as part of the Scientific Committee. In 2011, I was one of the (un)keynote speakers.

Teachers' collaboration networks as a PLE for professional development from Riina Vuorikari

Reading habits (paper based and web) by Finnish youth

The PISA results have since 2000 highlighted how Finnish 15-year olds excel in math, science, reading, etc. This report gives an interesting look into Finnish youth's reading habits, it includes both digital and paper-based media. Interestingly, we again find out that computers and ICTs are not often used for learning purposes, at least not in a formal learning setting (i.e. school, homework).   

Some outcomes (hastily) translated :

Since 2000, Finnish young people are reading the most variety of literature among 26 participating countries. The "reading index" that tracks the variety of reading, e.g. magazines, comics, literature (fiction and non-fiction) and newspapers is statistically decreasing in all countries. Apart from fiction and non-fiction book, Finnish youth reads less printed material. It is likely that the printed material has been replaced by, among other things, online reading and communication. 

In general, the use of web-based material among Finnish youth is at about average among PISA countries. In schools, however, computers are not used as actively as at home. In Finland, students seek less information on the Internet to help with homework and they rarely discuss their homework assignments online. Instead, the use of computer at home is mainly for pleasure purposes in Finland.

Parviainen (2012) Suomalaisnuorten lukemisen ja verkon käytön monipuolisuus http://www.oph.fi/julkaisut/2012/suomalaisnuorten_lukemisen_ja_verkon_kayton_monipuolisuus

International evaluation data on Science and Reading (TIMSS and PIRLS)

This international benchmarking data becomes available in 4 and 5 year cycles presenting participants’ achievement results in mathematics, science and reading.

For the past 20 years, TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study) has measured trends in mathematics and science achievement at the fourth and eighth grades. For the past 15 years PIRLS (Progress in International Reading Literacy Study) has measured trends in reading comprehension at the fourth grade. 

The results are presented as videos on YouTube, too, otherwise, the reports are available here.


A few pointers highlighted by my colleagues:

• An early start is critical: if parents before the start of primary school engage their children in literacy and numeracy activities (at home or at pre-primary schools) children had better scores in those subjects in the 4th grades. 
•  Fourth grade students with access to computers for instruction had higher average science achievement than those students with no access to computers for instruction (Page 235 TIMSS International Results in Science)

The EC's "Rethinking Education" strategy is out

The EC has its "Rethinking Education" strategy out since last week. You can find the communication and related documents in this link: http://ec.europa.eu/education/news/rethinking_en.htm.

What you also should look at it the Country Analysis. If I'm right, a little bit of my work is included in the analysis from Finland. One of my independent expert assignments this year was to write a long report on that, which was, most likely, used as a material for this piece of work. It's a nice feeling to be part of a big strategy report like this one ;)

A few highlights from the communication below. 

• Developing the competences of teaching staff is a continuing and increasingly urgent priority in all Member States. A completely new generation of teachers is ready to take over and a completely new set of skills are required from them. 
• It is essential that Member States create flexible options, such as high quality distance learning. Widening access and engagement through Open Education is a necessity. Technology will play a crucial role in this. 
• Apprenticeships are one very effective way to do this and I urge all Member States to develop more work-based learning schemes. 
• In particular, I support and welcome the initiative by EU Ministers of Education to boost cooperation to increase both the quantity and quality of work-based learning. The first steps will be taken at a meeting of EU Education Ministers in Berlin next month.
• Foreign language skills are especially important in times of crisis as they can open up new opportunities. That is why we are proposing a new benchmark on foreign language competences. 
• We shall also develop guidelines for entrepreneurship education at all levels including schools, universities and vocational education and training. This will encourage education institutions to develop more entrepreneurial approaches in areas including leadership, teacher development as well as curriculum delivery.

Merit pay for teachers - rambling thoughts on the issues

One answer to the issue of bad performing schools/students in the US has been the idea of merit pay for teachers. The Economist  reported on the topic recently using the case of New Jersey state, which, according to the article, has a real problem in its hands already since more than 15 years. Ugh..that's a long time, a whole childhood, if you wish..

Although they have been under the supervision of New Jersey’s state government since 1995, there has been little improvement since then. Only 40% of students read to the standard prescribed for their age, and in the 15 worst-performing schools the figure is less than 25%. More than 30% of pupils do not graduate. Few of those who do are ready for higher education. Of those who entered one local establishment, Essex County College, in 2009, a whopping 98% needed remedial maths and 87% had to take remedial English. As a result, fed-up parents are taking their children out of Newark’s public high schools and placing them in independent charter schools. Many public-school buildings now stand half-empty. The best teachers often leave in despair.

Merit pay for teachers Bonus time
A new contract for teachers is shaking up New Jersey’s largest city

It's impossible to understand the whole magnitude of the problem, but for now, I'm only wondering how such merit pay system works in an educational establishment? What is it based on? What does it really evaluate? Does it take into account how the students' perform, say, during the last academic year? Or how did they perform with other teachers for that matter? Or does it only concentrate on the teacher? What is the baseline for the evaluation? How well did you teach last year? How many hours you taught for a give group of kids? How well the kids that you teach perform in a standardised test over a period of time (which period;)? Is your "merit" based on your average performance with different group of kids if you for example teach math to several groups of kids?

Creating metrics for teacher performance has gotta have been a hec of a job, they probably spent lots of resources trying to figure that out. And then, I would also like to see how does it plays out in the school itself. Is the performance of all the teachers fitted on the normal curve to give the "grades"/merit pay? What if all the teachers' started teaching better, does it mean that non of them get any extra money?

I pay lots of attention to the TALIS study (OECD, 2009) where teachers' appraisal and feedback mechanisms as well as the feeling of self-efficacy are studied and discussed. The whole issue isn't only about the "quality" of teachers'  performance that is delivered to the kids, but the Professional Development and teacher cooperation opportunities in general play an important role too. Placing more emphasis on those factors might be a more helpful way forward..

Pedagogical Innovation and Connected Minds: two interesting reports

Teacher Network - Today's and tomorrow's challenges and opportunities for the teaching profession

We have just finalised a new book, the title is "Teacher networks - Today’s and tomorrow’s challenges and opportunities for the teaching profession". It's now at the printer and the launch event will take place later this month (Nov 14) at the Media & Learning Conference in Brussels.

I'm pretty exited about this, it's one of the major outcomes of my last project (www.tellnet.eun.org) that I've run for three years :)

Teacher networks - Today’s and tomorrow’s challenges and opportunities for the teaching profession from European Schoolnet

FP7 priorities for Creativity and Learning

Over the summer holidays, EU's new FP7 priorities for 2013 funding were communicated. Challenge 8. is related to learning, namely called "ICT for Creativity and Learning"

...Europe must also support national efforts to help students to learn better, teachers to teach better, and school systems to become more effective. This goal can be greatly advanced by learning systems that can adapt to effective use in a wide variety of diverse contexts.

Under 8.2 (technology enhanced  learning), they also mention Learning Analytics:

b) Learning analytics, educational data mining: tools and processes for collecting, storing, exploring and reasoning on large-scale educational data to better understand learners' knowledge, assess their progress and evaluate environments in which they learn. These tools and processes should aim at improving learning and teaching (including 21st century skills) for students and instructors.  

Learning analytics has now become such a hot topic. So, like all the others, I'm also studying the topic. Here is a link to my recent paper on learning analytics. I presented it this summer at “Open and Social Technologies for Networked Learning” in Tallinn.

Use of personas in communication (Professional Development Workshop)

"Personas" are used in marketing and product design to represents a group of customers so that the company can better focus its efforts. In companies such as Ford Motor Company, Microsoft and Reuters, personas are used to help better understanding of customers . A persona has a name, face, motivations, and goals - yet it is fictitious.

We in eTwinning also use personas to help our 27 National Support Services (NSS) better segment their "market" and focus their efforts. This time (June  27, NSS PDW) we worked on communication strategies. First all the six eTwinning personas were introduced (see the slides below). Then we set up groupwork to think of strategies; first of all,  how the NSS can identify eTwinners who belong to different personas?  and then, what are the strategies to communicate with them?

Identifying an active eTwinner like Maria or Peter (slides, page 8 and 10) can be rather straight forward for the NSS. They can use the "NSS desktop tools" that allow monitoring eTwinners' activities in their own country. Especially Marias are someone that the NSS staff already knows rather well and is most likely already in continuous communication with (they are often times also "eTwinning Ambassadors").

However, the most interesting and "potential" eTwinners for NSS are Marcus, Lucia, Shaun and Nina (slides, pages 12, 14, 16, 18) . They already are aware of eTwinning and have most likely established an account, but for a reason or another, are inactive or dormant users. In the workshop, we brainstormed better and more efficient communication strategies for these personas.

eTwinning personas

View more PowerPoint from European Schoolnet

Social Analytics for eTwinning

For the eTwinning report in 2011, I worked on creating a conceptual framework for eTwinning Analytics with a little "proof of concept"-study. The report itself is only for internal use, but we re-worked it into a research paper. The paper contributes to the field of Learning Analytics, which is pretty hot right now (see LAK12). This combines my personal research interests as well as my work (e.g. the Tellnet project, monitoring eTwinning).

An interesting thing about the framework is that we build it around the OECD‘s indices for teachers’ co-operation. This was one of the outcomes of the TALIS study which is one of my favourites. The TALIS study takes a wide look into teaching as a profession in a number of OECD countries. 

The definition of eTwinning Analytics follows the one from G.Siemens (2010) on Learning Analytics in general:

eTwinning Analytics focuses on the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of data about eTwinners and their contexts, for purposes of understanding and optimising their co-operation and the environment in which it occurs. The goal of eTwinning Analytics, therefore, is to offer eTwinning stakeholders better tools to monitor the action through emerging trends and patterns upon which they can better base their decisions.

The paper can be downloaded here!

Social Learning Analytics to study Teachers’ Large-scale Professional Networks  
{Riina.Vuorikari, Santi.Scimeca}@eun.org  

Abstract. A growing interest in research focuses on teachers’ large-scale socio- technical networks. Social learning approaches such as social constructivist theory is well established, however, the current challenges lie in creating reliable methods to gather evidence of how and under which conditions social learning takes place in such socio-technical networks and how does it support teachers’ lifelong learning goals. The field of Learning Analytics (LA) addresses the issue of individual learners, whereas Social Learning Analytics (SLA) addresses that of groups’ processes in knowledge construction. 

 The eTwinning action is used as a case study for applying the concepts of Social Learning Analytics. Our interest is on teachers’ co-operation behaviour and patterns within a socio-technical network and how that can support teachers’ continuous professional development. The eTwinning platform currently hosts more than 160000 European teachers. We first introduce the underlying pedagogical and lifelong learning related assumptions regarding teachers’ co- operation. To better understand the type of activities that teachers undertake in eTwinning, they are classified according to the OECD‘s indices for teachers’ co-operation. This creates the core of the eTwinning Analytics framework, which operationalises activities and allows them to be better measured and monitored. A snapshot of data from the platform is used as a proof of concept.

A set of case studies focusing on "school teams"

As part of my assignments for 2012, I'm running a set of case studies on eTwinning school teams. The full set of case studies will be published on the eTwinning website and a sub-set will become a printed publication. They will come out at the end of 2012. The objective of these case studies is: to better understand eTwinning teams in schools; to analyse existing models of school team in eTwinning, andto understand what makes them work (enablers) and what not (inhibitors).

The case study framework includes the following aspects:

• Different models of school teams (i.e. whole school approach lead by a school head vs. teacher-led innovation) and the proportion of teachers in the school who are part of the school team 
• What kind of roles exist in teams within school and outside of school (involvement of internal and external actors in the school team)
• School organisational climate (e.g. vision on ICT integration, international collaboration, cross-curricular work, the whole school approach, history of innovation), 
• Organisation of learning (layout of the learning units; allocation of students into learning groups) both in school and out of school. 
• Infrastructure and resources (not only technical, but also physical, like libraries, etc) used within eTwinning teams both in school and out of school. 
• Other conditions: Teachers PD, peer-learning opportunities within the school, national and local policies enabling/ encouraging the teamwork 

To conceive the framework, I went through a bunch of papers and studies, out of which I was most inspired by this set of studies:

Forkosh-Baruch, A., Nachmias, R., & Mioduser, D. (2008). Innovative pedagogical practices using technology: Cross-case analysis of the SITESm2 data. Presented at the 3rd IEA International Research Conference, Taipei, Chinese Taipei. Retrieved from http://www.iea.nl/irc-2008.html#c2050

Forkosh-Baruch, A., Nachmias, R., Mioduser, D., & Tubin, D. (2005). “Islands of Innovation”and “School-Wide Implementations”: Two Patterns of ICT-based Pedagogical Innovations in Schools. An Interdisciplinary Journal on Humans in ICT Environments, 1(2), 202–215.

Nachmias, R., Mioduser, D., Cohen, A., Tubin, D., & Forkosh-Baruch, A. (2004). Factors Involved in the Implementation of Pedagogical Innovations Using Technology. Education and Information Technologies, 9(3), 291–308. doi:10.1023/B:EAIT.0000042045.12692.49

I also have been following up the Innovative Teaching and Learning (ITL) Research project for inspiration. 

Opening the teachers' professional development workshop on eTwinning

Last week about 80 teachers from various European countries gathered in Lithuania for a 3-day teachers' professional development workshop. I had the honor to give the opening speech in the event which focused on the eTwinning school collaboration in the field of STEM. eTwinning is "the community for schools in Europe", currently more than 160000 teachers have signed up. STEM fields stand for Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths.

In my presentation, I highlighted what are the good ingredients of an eTwinning school project. For this purpose, I "demystified" one of the awarded eTwinning projects in math (ATOM - a taste of math) using this video as an example.

I also talked about the importance of teachers' collaboration, both across schools and within the school. The main campaign in eTwinning this year is about school teams. By the end of the year, we will have a set of case studies from about 20 European countries on how eTwinning school teams work - a great way to highlight good practices but also to analyse different models.

Enjoy the slides of the opening speech below!Twinning PDW on STEM

View more presentations from European Schoolnet.

Country monographs on synergies between teachers’ professional development and eTwinning

The eTwinning report Teachers’ professional development – An overview of current practice was published by European Schoolnet in December 2010, it aims at understanding how eTwinning and national and local teachers’ professional development schemes interact. The report focused on three case studies, namely on Estonia, Poland and Spain.

The report, called "Teachers’ Professional Development: an overview of current practice" can be downloaded in different languages as a pdf file here:  DE, EN, ES, FR, IT

Here is the reference in APA style: 
Vuorikari, R. (2010). eTwinning Report 2010: Teachers’ professional development: an overview of current practice. European Schoolnet. 

Contributing to the Polish Presidency on Mobility

The Polish Presidency of the Council of the European Union organised a conference on "Mobility as a tool to acquire and develop competences from childhood to seniority” in October 2011. I participated  in two workshops as an expert on virtual mobility for teachers. The proceedings of the conference include my short paper called Virtual mobility and teachers’ collaboration networks.

Do netbooks require a different type of pedagogy?

In the beginning of the Educational Netbook Pilot, I was often asked whether netbooks really require a different type of pedagogy. I was rather convinced that they do, especially under the circumstances that our pilot was implementing them: 8000 netbooks were distributed in more than 200 classes in 6 European countries. This was a rather disruptive change.

From the end of 2009 until the end of 2011, I was the project manager and chief investigator of the Acer-European Schoolnet Educational Netbook Pilot. I was responsible for implementing the pilot from scratch, meaning establishing links with national points in 6 countries, facilitating finding the schools, organising a network of national pedagogical coordinators,  implementing pedagogical support through a community website, conducting evaluation and finalising the evaluation report. At the end, I was rather convinced that to use netbooks successfully, a netbook pedagogy is needed.

Below a 30-minute video presentation of the final results elaborating also on the concept of the netbook, or any 1:1 pedagogy (e.g. with tablets). Links to the reports can also be found below.



The final report "Introducing netbook pedagogies in schools" is available to download here (pdf, 7Mb).

Reference: Vuorikari, R., Garoia, V., & Balanskat, A. (2011). Introducing Netbook Pedagogies in Schools. Acer - European Schoolnet Educational Netbook Pilot. European Schoolnet.

The country reports are available in respective languages:

• Italy country report in ITALIAN (pdf)
• France country report in FRENCH (pdf)
• Spain country report in SPANISH (pdf)
• Turkey country report TURKISH (pdf)
• Germany country report in GERMAN (pdf)