European conference EMINENT VI ; session B4, Friday 9th December 2005

Report about 8th on Angela Baker blog.

Workshop B : ICT in schools policy
Theme : Issues and solutions related to wideing the uptake of ICT school systems. Delegates experienced in ICT policy-making in Ministries of Education will consider key policy actions to widen the use of ICT schools in Europe.

Session B4 : Rewriting ICT policy : What does embedding require? Identifying the key actions for change : analytical framework and roadmap of policy development.

BECTA presentation, Pr John Anderson, Inspector Northern Ireland and Pr Bob Mc Cormick, Open University
Quality in elearning
How provide effective learning and enhance learners engagement?

Provide authentic materials
An authentic material give a good representation of ideas or situations present outside of the school : they are realistic and should be appropriate to personal orientations.
For exp : to show a bakery and the process to make bread, show a real picture of a real (and local if possible) bakery.
For exp : a simulation to measure voltage using pictures of a real one.
Some experiences were made using simulation alone, try real objects alone without simulations and finally, create a lesson with a combination of the 2 situations. The results were the best with this third option.
There is an issue there as sometimes it is difficult to have a real situation (chimical…)

What are the characteristics of a good learning?
Engage learner in thinking (even when they click on a screen)
Control of pace
Control of path through the material
Enabling, even raging meta cognitive thinking
Enabling collaboration
Give a formative assessment and useful feedback and this is very difficult to do.

Kaleidoscope presentation, Nicolas Balacheff, CNRS, Laboratoire Leibniz

New technologies and ICT become "ambient", it means : user centred, personal, networked, portable, ubiquitous.

ICT become an empowering link : allow interaction, social discussion even to argue.
ICT are not interesting in themselves but because human being.
But they provide new situations, more and renewed complexity.

Technology Learners Situations
Interactive Autonomous School
Wireless Socialized Informal
Distributed Collaborative At work, training…

Before, we had teachers and learners and one model for learning and teaching. Now, we have several models, specialists needing to work together, several and different situations for a large diversity of domains and professionals.

In this complexity, there is a common concern : do they learn? How do they learn, what do they learn?

We can feel a growing awareness and growing tensions between:
Individual versus social
Open-source versus market
Education versus technology
Learning versus teaching & training
Basic research versus products & services

Research needs to take up the challenge
What is the Return on Investment in the research?
 Reliability, universality and openness of its results
 A method to learn from success and failure outcomes

What is the cost of research?
 Theoretical nature of its outcomes
 Its method itself, explicit conceptualisation, rational and validation)

Keeping asking "why" ? and not re-invent the wheel

I have given to you the reasons to build Kaleidoscope, a concept and method for the design, implementation and use of ICT for human learning.
To have a global strategy to take up the challenge of complexity.
To link research programs and benchmark.

Today, 23 countries, 78 contractors and 996 researchers all over Europe work together in Kaleidoscope to create a research network across cultures, organisations and disciplines.

European Schoolnet presentation, Roger Blamire
"Towards a framework for new schooling environments"
key questions are :
Who dominates the context?
How do they operate in the policy process?
Where does their authority rest?
What happens if we apply these 3 questions to the learning area?

Who?
We can list : ministries and ministers individually; National and regional ICT bodies; curriculum bodies; teacher Unions; Advisors; researchers.
But Today some new ones are operating :
OECD : see 2004 report
Not forgetting European Commission itself with Lisbon initiative : it is an obvious policy maker and prescriptor
UNESCO : see "Towards Knowledge societies", Nov 2005 by Koïchiro Matsuura
Private sectors initiatives for teachers : see Microsoft, Mariana Patru on www97.intel
TELCOS; New policy shapers; World bank
Policy unplugged, on channel 4, a very interesting model to develop policies and put people together to think on policy.

How?
These new policy methods are coming from business and corporate world, offering "fresh thinking" and dynamism, global, practical, disposal thinking.

Where?
In relation to policy planning :
putting issues on the policy agenda,
helping policy makers their current and future requirement
In relation to policy development:
See : Alan Mc Culey, "Policy and innovation in practice"

why is this happening now?

1) Emergence of a policy commons :

Policy work is increasingly global
Policy work is fast and getting faster
Policy work use policy workers (non coming from a specific field) rather than academic

2) "Desintegration" of the learning field
How policy makers can trust "expert"?
Is there a reasonably robust widely vision?
Does the practice area mesh well with the policy interest?
Learning field is in flux, even in chaos!
We can find best innovation in policy making in non-profit and social working.
See: opendemocraty.net
How to Create the conditions:
Bridge the divisions and tackle the tensions between practitioners, policy leaders, industry voices and researchers. Look to the edge with network of expertise, peer review, educational hacking, activism and engagement with supra-nationals bodies.

Plenary session

Ministry of Australian Education
Put pedagogy in a new way
Learners and all ICT users are not talking about technology, they just want to be connected. There were constructivism in pedagogy, we have to face now "connectivism"
That's what we build Global Exchange Network In Education (GENIE) born out of the Global Summit towards a seamless global learning framework.

Joël de Rosnay; LaVillette, France
Presentation on the website : http://www.joelderosnay.com/
We are living a extraordinary evolution : fast, convergence, complexity
We need a massive program in Europe to face these 3 challenges A bottom up approach : knowledge media, not one to several, but one to one: Peer to Peer with blogs, wikis and so on… Young people are today creators of contents.
Why not a contest in Europe with awards to know what they want we learn them?

Learning program process has nothing to do with the way of life. Divide complexity in disciplines is not a proper way to understand. This is interaction between disciplines that it is interesting: history + values + economy : analytic and systemic.
Games, simulations, case studies : all disciplines are there, co-invented, co-produced with our learners.
ecology, economy, biological need to be more used because they are integrative way to learn.
Ecology, education, health and Internet (ICT in general) are key issues for our learners and we have to integrate them in our learning.
The strength of Europe is to have a global view and policy and a great cultural diversity : use it!

Resume of the 4 workshops

Workshop A: schools are in transition, they have change a lot in the 5 past years. Teachers are enthusiastic embracing ICT and agree to experiment but the context don't allow risk.

Workshop B: 3 key messages
1- Bridge are necessary between practitioners, policies, researchers and industry.
2- Policy makers need to improve their competencies.
3- Spread out good practice and be aware of bottom up and challenge the 2 approaches: down and up.

Workshop C : improve content, quality access for teachers, quality criteria, guidelines to share in the learning community. Simulations are a key point. Build a common framework.

Workshop D : cross-sector interaction; one common base of reflection is that about security everybody is concern an need to be in the loop, even the children.