UOC UNESCO Chair in e-Learning Blog

UNESCO-L’ORÉAL Programa internacional de becas “Por las mujeres en la ciencia”

El programa UNESCO – L’ORÉAL “Por las mujeres en la ciencia” es una iniciativa conjunta que busca promover la presencia de la mujer en la ciencia. El programa tiene diferentes niveles. En primer lugar, el Premio L’ORÉAL de mujeres científicas, galardón que reconoce la labor de las científicas más destacadas de todo el mundo siendo elegidas una por cada continente.

En segundo lugar, ha creado el programa internacional de becas para jóvenes científicas que se concede desde París. Y por último, las Bolsas de investigación para científicas que condece L’ORÉAL de cada país en que el grupo empresarial está presente y que se lleva a cabo con la presencia de las Comisiones Nacionales para la UNESCO.

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After reading this news, we remembered a certain quote by George Siemens:

“[...] Education seems to be at the threshold of a very dramatic change”

Article by Nick DeSantis published in The Chronicle of Higher Education

Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology today announced a partnership that will host online courses from both institutions free of charge. The platform, its creators say, has the potential to improve face-to-face classes on the home campuses while giving students around the world access to a blue-ribbon education.

The new venture, called edX, grew out of MIT’s announcement last year that it would offer free online courses on a platform called MITx. The combined effort will be overseen by a nonprofit organization governed equally by both universities, each of which has committed $30-million to the project. Anant Agarwal,  director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, who led the development of MITx, will serve as edX’s first president.

Students who complete the courses on the edX platform will not receive university credit, although they could earn certificates.

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This article was published by Jay Cross in the Internet Time Blog under a CreativeCommons BY-NC-SA 2.5 License

Flipping learning is big in education. It will be big in corporate learning. Let’s not blow it.

[...]

Flipping makes a ton a sense. The learner can watch the mini-lectures when it’s convenient to do so. The learner controls the pace by pausing, replaying, or fast-forwarding. In all likelihood, the presentation by the enthusiastic Salmaan Khan or a popular Stanford prof is going to be more engaging than your local school teacher or grad student teaching assistant. The video can provide content in small, digestible pieces. Once it’s in the can, the video can be replayed again and again. And of course, video delivered online scales without an increase in cost.

More important for learning outcomes, the time spent in class can be put to more productive use. Learners convene to get answers to questions, discuss examples, put what they’ve learned in context, debate, explore, and extend their knowledge. Instead of passively listening to an instructor, they actively engage the material. Instructors, freed of the need to mouth the words of lessons, focus on helping learners understand things and coaching individuals. These activities can take place online, and people can learn from one another in virtual communities and support groups.

[...]

When times were tough, training departments slashed budgets by replacing face-to-face instruction with online reading. They failed to follow through with the discussions, practice, social processing, and reinforcement that makes lessons stick. It didn’t work. Most eLearning is ineffective drudgery.

That’s my nightmare about flipping learning in the corporation, that organizations will once again confuse exposure to content with learning. It’s great to replace lectures with video clips — IF you retain the opportunity for people to ask questions, interact with the material, practice what they’ve learned, collaborate with others, and periodically refresh their memories. This takes a sound learning ecosystem, a workscape.

[...]

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Photo by | mark242 under a CreativeCommons CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 License

Posiblemente a estas alturas estáis ya familiarizados con las palabras SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) y PIPA (Protect IP Act). Ambos son acrónimos que responden a proyectos de ley estadounidenses destinados, en un sentido amplio, a la protección de los derechos de propiedad intelectual en la red.

Estos dos proyectos de ley han sido y son ampliamente criticados por anteponer de forma injusta los intereses de propiedad intelectual de diferentes industrias a los derechos de la ciudadanía en general, suponiendo una amenaza a la libertad de expresión, a la privacidad, y un freno a la innovación y a la inversión en servicios en Internet.

Por si esto no fuera suficiente, ahora se nos presenta recientemente CISPA (Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act), un nuevo proyecto de ley que propone, bajo el pretexto de vigilar el riesgo de ciber-amenazas, otorgar a las autoridades la capacidad de acceso y monitorización de los datos de usuarios gestionados u almacenados por entes privados (como los proveedores de Internet o proveedores de servicios de correo, por ejemplo).

A continuación os presentamos un artículo que nos viene explicar un poco sus implicaciones:

SOPA Mutates Into Much Worse CISPA, the Latest Threat to Internet Free Speech >> (nationofchange.org)

Destacamos el siguiente comentario del artículo que hemos mencionado, que nos demuestra que estos proyectos de ley no son iniciativas aisladas:

By SAULT:
The Conservative government in Canada is trying the exact same thing, with their proposed Bill C30. Since they have a majority right now, it will be passed into “law.”

This so-called “Lawful Access Legislation” (Unlawful Access CRIME) atrocity is against the real law, because it pre-judges all citizens guilty until (never) proven innocent.

Further, it is not only wasteful and unworkable, it endangers everyone in the public, by pretending cops are more trustworthy than the average Joe (just read the daily papers for proof that it ain’t so)!

If random cops can hack my email at will, without any kind of judicial oversites nor timelines, then they can also easily plant fake emails there as “evidence” for crimes I didn’t commit in the first place.

Therefore, since the judges will have to accept this truth (that the “evidence” can be easily faked, if the cops can just go into our emails whenever they feel like it, without asking for permission from a judge or even their bosses, first,) NO “evidence” gained from this proposed “Lawful Access Legislation” (Unlawful Access Crime) will even be held valid nor stand up in court.

i.e: NO email “evidence” will EVER again be able to be held forth to be legally valid!!!!

So this “law” is a complete waste of time and of our tax money.

And, WORSE, this bill also increases the dangers of the internet exponentially: if I am, say, an author (or CEO with sensitive proprietary product information specs), who keeps his drafts in his email online, or sends them to his publisher (or a CEO who sends reports on products to his subordinates,) what’s to stop some cops on the take from stealing those, and selling them to my competition, too?! Who would ever know about their crimes?!

And why are the judges silent on these proposed thefts of their own constitutional powers to vet the cops to review, issue or deny search warrants, based on objective needs, not subjective wants?!

These bills do the EXACT OPPOSITE of what they pretend to do!

Foto por | michi003 bajo Licencia CreativeCommons CC-BY 2.0

This article by Martin Hilbert (USC – University of Southern California) was published in Women’s Studies International Forum journal in 2011.

ABSTRACT

The discussion about women’s access to and use of digital Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in developing countries has been inconclusive so far. Some claim that women are rather technophobic and that men are much better users of digital tools, while others argue that women enthusiastically embrace digital communication. This article puts this question to an empirical test. We analyze data sets from 12 Latin American and 13 African countries from 2005-08. This is believed to be the most extensive empirical study in this field so far. The results are surprisingly consistent and revealing: the reason why fewer women access and use ICT is a direct result of their unfavorable conditions with respect to employment, education and income. When controlling for these variables, women turn out to be more active users of digital tools than men. This turns the alleged digital gender divide into an opportunity: given women’s affinity for ICT, and given that digital technologies are tools that can improve living conditions, ICT represent a concrete and tangible opportunity to tackle longstanding challenges of gender inequalities in developing countries, including access to employment, income, education and health services.

Read the full article (Web – Elsevier) >>

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