Posts filed under 'Education'
The Intel® Learn Program is a global education initiative to teach children the 21st century skills needed to work in a knowledge economy: technological literacy, critical thinking and collaboration. The program is a hands-on, interactive curriculum comprised of two 30-hour units entitled Technology and Community and Technology at Work. Using a project-based approach, the curriculum’s activities and projects demonstrate to learners how technology can contribute to and help improve their communities.
Has it been successful in teaching the desired skills? According to a Review of Evaluation Findings for the Intel Learn Program published in 2006 by SRI International, the answer is yes. The two-year evaluation focused on eight countries where Intel Learn is offered to a total of 192,691 learners, mostly in informal educational settings. In general, children who participate in Intel Learn make gains in the three primary program goal areas. Key findings are as follows:
- Across ages, genders, and regions, learners show high levels of engagement in program activities and motivation to attend. 97% of participant learners complete the program.
- Improvements in technological literacy: program instructors overwhelmingly report that learners in the program improve their technical skills (graphics, word processing, spreadsheets and multimedia are measured). Further, local evaluators who worked with SRI International documented that in Egypt children are teaching the technology skills they have learned through the program to parents and siblings.
- Critical thinking: a majority of educators observed positive change in learners’ critical-thinking and problem-solving abilities by the end of the course.
- Collaboration: students in all countries learn to work effectively as members of a group, relying on each other to gain new technical skills and solve technical problems, to develop their ideas for projects and activities, and to review and revise their work. Students in the program come to see their peers as key resources for learning.
- It’s not only learners that benefit from the program: teachers generally find that the program lets them rethink their role to place less emphasis on dispensing information and more emphasis on promoting students’ active exploration, problem solving, and creativity. One classroom teacher noted the new insights and capabilities she gained from the program, saying, “Even though I was teaching for the last 2 years, it is now that I understand how to facilitate [student learning].”
References in the report that are of particular interest:
June 27th, 2007
Last week Steve Vosloo assisted in the inaugural 3-day Digital Storytelling Workshop for Educators at the Center for Digital Storytelling, Berkeley, CA. Eleven participants, mostly teachers from across the USA, created their own short digital stories — following the classic digital storytelling process, including participation in a story circle, writing and recording scripts and the production of the stories using digital technology — and also shared experiences and ideas of incorporating digital storytelling into classrooms.
In the USA, digital storytelling can be fitted into curricula standards for writing/language arts, communications and social studies. A challenge is that digital storytelling actually provides learning opportunities that are not accounted for or measured within the standard curricula content and tests.
One of the participating teachers, Ben Grey, has had his 5th-grade students create and publish podcasts about school and community-related content in a project called News from the Greypevine.
June 23rd, 2007
A paper co-authored by Henry Jenkins, Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, titled Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century, considers the proliferation of online content creation and networking activities by teens in the USA.
Jenkins’ paper explains that most of these teens are involved in participatory cultures:
“A participatory culture is a culture with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations, and some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices. A participatory culture is also one in which members believe their contributions matter, and feel some degree of social connection with one another (at the least they care what other people think about what they have created). Forms of participatory culture include:
- Affiliations — memberships, formal and informal, in online communities centered around various forms of media, such as Friendster, Facebook, message boards, metagaming, game clans, or MySpace).
- Expressions — producing new creative forms, such as digital sampling, skinning and modding, fan videomaking, fan fiction writing, zines, mash-ups).
- Collaborative Problem-solving — working together in teams, formal and informal, to complete tasks and develop new knowledge (such as through Wikipedia, alternative reality gaming, spoiling).
- Circulations — Shaping the flow of media (such as podcasting, blogging).
A growing body of scholarship suggests potential benefits of these forms of participatory culture, including opportunities for peer-to-peer learning, a changed attitude toward intellectual property, the diversification of cultural expression, the development of skills valued in the modern workplace, and a more empowered conception of citizenship. Participatory culture shifts the focus of literacy from one of individual expression to community involvement. The new literacies almost all involve social skills developed through collaboration and networking. These skills build on the foundation of traditional literacy, research skills, technical skills, and critical analysis skills taught in the classroom.
The new skills include:
- Play — the capacity to experiment with one’s surroundings as a form of problem-solving.
- Performance — the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery.
- Simulation — the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real-world processes.
- Appropriation — the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content.
- Multitasking — the ability to scan one’s environment and shift focus as needed to salient details.
- Distributed Cognition — the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities.
- Collective Intelligence — the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal.
- Judgment — the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources.
- Transmedia Navigation — the ability to follow the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities.
- Networking — the ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information.
- Negotiation — the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms.”
“A central goal of this report is to shift the focus of the conversation about the digital divide from questions of technological access to those of opportunities to participate and to develop the cultural competencies and social skills needed for full involvement. Schools as institutions have been slow to react to the emergence of this new participatory culture; the greatest opportunity for change is currently found in afterschool programs and informal learning communities. Fostering such social skills and cultural competencies requires a more systemic approach to media education in the United States.”
Question: is this relevant to youth and educators in developing countries? Can the same appropriation of technology be expected of youth in South Africa? Is there an equal need for cultural competencies and social skills needed there? And can these activities, which are clearly engaging for young people, be used as a vehicle for other forms of learning?
At Molotech we are very interested in exploring these questions. We believe that the answer to most will be “yes.”
June 12th, 2007
The MobilED platform innovatively combines a MediaWiki server with mobile technologies to create an audiowiki, which enables users to access and author content with basic mobile phones using SMS or advanced handsets with MMS capability. Watch one of the short usage scenario videos to see how MobilED can work.
The widespread uptake of mobile technologies has created many opportunities for collaborative and mobile learning (mlearning). The MobilED (Mobile EDucation) project, led by the Media Lab at the University of Art and Design, Helsinki, and the Meraka Institute in South Africa, aims to explore these opportunities within the field of youth education, in and out of schools. The project is aimed at designing formal and informal learning and teaching environments that are meaningfully enhanced with mobile technologies and services, and is based on principles of social constructivist pedagogy, including group-centered learning, project-based learning, problem solving and inquiry learning. It is an open-source and open content initiative that creates the ability for all to access and, more importantly, contribute their knowledge to shared online information repositories. There has been keen interest in the project from the educational sector: other MobilED pilots are happening in Brazil and India, with plans underway for Colombia, Mexico and New Zealand.
The project includes the design, development and piloting of prototype applications where multimedia and language technologies (text, images, audio) are used via mobile phones as tools in the learning process. Two working prototypes have been developed: the MobilED Kit – a box with mobile tools, software and guidebook for use in a classroom or youth club to carry out collaborative mobile learning projects, and the MobilED Server – a technology platform to support the kit. The MobilED server has been used with a MediaWiki – to create an audiowiki – as follows:
- A user can search for a term by sending an SMS to the server,
- The server then calls the user, and
- A speech synthesizer will read the article found in the wiki. Users can navigate through the audio of the article (skip forward, back, etc.)
- The user can also contribute his/her content by dictating it to the system.
The system has been successfully piloted three times in South African schools: the first two involving basic mobile phones and the audiowiki, which was first seeded with content relevant to the pilots. The students assessed the effects of HIV/AIDS on the different levels of society (person, family, community, etc.), and collectively pointed out different strategies that are, or can be, employed at each of these levels. They first conducted research by accessing the audiowiki, then they recorded their strategy message as an audio piece via MobilED. The message was communicated to the school community as an audiocasting show. To access the audiowiki and the audiocasting service, the students shared Nokia 3230 phones with speakers. They did not use a PCs at all.
Whereas the first two pilots focused on the mobile technology most accessible in South Africa – basic phones capable of SMS and making and receiving voice calls – the third pilot looked at the use of more advanced mobile phones with multimedia capabilities. It consisted of a joint project between a low-income public school and affluent, private school, based on MMS (text, image, audio) content. The collaborative task for the students was to create a presentation about a field trip to the Meraka Institute. They used the phones to take photos, add text, compile a slide presentation and MMS it to the server. The students worked together in pairs.
Overall, the results show that students learned to use mobile phones very fast in the small groups, even when not at all ICT literate. Students were engaged and energized throughout the learning experience; during the contextual interviews, the students told that they found the field tests very interesting and empowering. Recording their own audio was the most exciting part of the pilot.
The real potential of the MobilED solution in developing countries is that anyone with a mobile phone is able to be an active participant in the information society by being a contributor and not just a passive recipient of information. It also facilitates that elusive goal of the creation of more (digital) local content in local languages.
Molotech and MobilED are currently exploring the possibility of a cross-cultural collaboration between youth in the US and South Africa using the MobilED platform.
May 30th, 2007
The presentation tonight at Stanford University titled Rigorous Research on the Effects of Learning Technology: Are We Learning Anything? was summarized by the eLearning Forum as follows:
“Barbara Means and Jeremy Roschelle, co-directors of SRI International’s Center for Technology in Learning were involved in two major studies of technology effectiveness at scale that released reports this spring. The two reports seem to support very different conclusions about technology’s potential to improve student learning.
- In a 4-year project, Means led SRI’s study of classroom implementation of the 15 commercial reading and mathematics software products involved in the Institute of Education Science’s Evaluation of the Effectiveness of Educational Technology Interventions (EETI), a U.S. Department of Education study led by Mathematica Policy Research. In that study conducted with 439 teachers at four grade levels, classes assigned randomly to the software treatment condition had post-test achievement no different from those assigned to business as usual (the control condition).
- In contrast, Roschelle’s study of scaling up the SimCalc mathematics curriculum, software and associated teacher development to 48 classes in Texas, found a striking difference in student performance in these classes compared to 47 control classes.”
Steve Vosloo attended the presentation. The key issues for him were:
- In the first study, the measurements were simply based on grade levels using standard tests. This means that any value that the software brought to student learning, which wasn’t measured for by the usual tests, was not recorded. In the second study, Roschelle created measurement metrics that would capture any improvement in student learning that SimCalc specifically sets out to teach. Technology can add value in addition to text books, but we need to measure for that value specifically.
- In the second study, the improvement in student performance brought about by the software was consistent across more affluent and low-income schools. In some of the poorer schools, teachers involved in the study had never used a computer before.
- The improvements in the second study can probably be attributed to 1) a holistic approach to getting the software into the classroom that included professional teacher development (i.o.w. thorough training in using the software), 2) very good software that is totally in support of the curriculum (and therefore makes the teachers work easier, not harder) and 3) measuring for the correct factors.
More information:
May 23rd, 2007
