24 April

About Girls, Skills and Jobs, and MOOCs

Gender & ICTs, OpenEd & OER

Today around 7 million people work in the ICT sector. However, out of the ICT workforce only 30% are women. Women are under-represented at all levels in the ICT sector, especially in decision-making positions. The ICT sector is rapidly growing creating around 120 000 new jobs every year. But due to differences in demands and skills – and despite the soaring European unemployment – there may be a lack of 700 000 skilled ICT workers in 2015:

Other estimates go even farther: While demand for employees with ICT skills is growing by around 3% a year, the number of graduates from computing sciences fell by 10% between 2006 and 2010. If this trend continues, there could be up to 900 000 unfilled ICT practitioners’ vacancies in the EU by 2015:

One way to reverse this negative trend is to encourage young people, and in particularly women, to take up an ICT-related career. The European Commission wants more to be done across Europe to inspire young women to get interested in ICT. This priority is reflected in the Digital Agenda’s pillar “Enhancing digital, literacy, skills and inclusion”, concretely in action 60, whereas it describes the aim of the Commission to increase the participation of women in the ICT workforce:

Some of the initiatives launched to create growth and jobs in Europe are the following:

* The Grand Coalition for Digital Jobs was identified as a key priority in the Digital Agenda Review adopted in December 2012.

* In January 2013, the Commission adopted the Entrepreneurship 2020 Action Plan to unleash Europe’s entrepreneurial potential, unlock expertise, mentoring, technology and services; work with European investors in order to increase the flow of venture capital and crowd-funding (in particular for web start-ups); and stimulate the emergence of Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) and the setting up of platforms for mentoring and skill building:

More details can be found on the following websites:

02 November

A new development for the OLPC

Education Worldwide

OLPC in Ethiopia © One Laptop per Child – Flickr

The initiative One Laptop Per Child, which has distributed until now 3 million laptops to kids in 40 different countries worldwide, has undertaken a very encouraging experience.

A few months ago they gave tablets to kids in two remote Ethiopian villages. Closed boxes full of tablets had been dropped, with no instructions and with preloaded programs. The objective was to see how far the children would get. These kids were illiterate and had had no previous exposure to written words. 5 days after the tablets were dropped, OLPC workers observed how kids had customized their desktops, were using more than 47 different apps and some of them had even hacked the videocamera, which was predisabled in the tablets. A few months later, workers noticed kids singing the alphabet and some of them even writing words. Does it sound familiar? Yes, Sugata Mitra is an important part of the experiment.

The curiosity and abilities of these kids have impressed Nicholas Negroponte, founder of One Laptop Per Child initiative. Even if they can still not prove that a kid can learn to read and write this way, they are very optimist: “If it gets funded, it would need to continue for another year and a half or two to come to a conclusion that the scientific community would accept”.

Read the full article here.

Related links:

OLPC website

OLPC in Ethiopia

Rwanda’s experience

24 October

Gender equality: from the grassroots of society to the political agenda

Gender & ICTs

On October 1^st, the UNESCO Chair in e-Learning participated in the final Roundtable of the research project “Professional trajectories of women in ICT: employment dynamics and policy responses in Spain & the UK”, that has been carried out by the Gender & ICT research program of the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3). This project has analized the gender differences and consequent exclusion of women in ICT, in an academic dimension as well as in a professional and employment scale. The research has focused on comparing the cases between UK and Spain, with the help and experience of professionals from both countries and the financial support of spanish Instituto de la Mujer.

The study has also followed and analysed examples from governmental Spanish initiative Plan Avanza, which had a line of action on promoting gender inclusive policies among women in ICTs. At this point, when the design and effectiveness of the different policies and plans have been studied, the investigation has reached and end and it is time to rise up conclusions to draw the pattern of change.

Final roundtable Gender & ICT at UOC University from UOC UNESCO Chair in e-Learning

Juliet Webster, currently the Director of the study, stated at the roundtable: “The change has to be made in the grassroots of society. Women have to start thinking in a non sexist way. For sustainable gender policies we need women in all jobs”. She highlighted the empowerment that women need in order to get fair and equal chances. Also she pointed out that all women should be aware that “the engagement with ICTs needs to be over the life course”.

But as Webster remembers in one of her last articles at Open Thoughts Blog, there are still a lot of gender “stubborn inequalities”, and we just need to look at the data: “Throughout the EU, women earn on average 18% less than their male counterparts with equivalent qualifications and experience. Women also remain remarkably under-represented in top jobs, disappearing from career ladders as they ascend. They only represent 16.1% of board members of Fortune 500 companies”.

Just 20% of graduate women worldwide have a computer science degree

Cecilia Castaño, who served as former Director and now is advisor for the current one, explained that at this crucial point of the investigation all the efforts have to be focused on giving quality information to governments and administrations so they can lead the change: “Governments should include the gender agenda in their policies. There should not be distinctions according to the ideologies of the parties. Mobilisation of different stakeholders is vital and this includes ensuring high-level political support”.

Nevertheless, Castaño remembered that there “have to be many other society actors involved: gender agencies, educational institutions, parents associations, companies and foundations. They all have to work together to achieve goals and incentivise women to take a leading role for this purpose”.

Researchers agree that further action and study need to be done; most important of all work is to “tackle the right stakeholders”. Many countries have failed in achieving such policies but others have obtained success, like Sweden. There is where researchers look up to. Measures should be designed from the basis of women needs (from bottom to top) and they need to be sustainable, meaning that they have to be checked and evaluated continuously to achieve long term results. And most important of all: for the implementation of these policies continuity of funding is fundamental, that is when gender policies will have a true real spot in the political agenda.

Related Links:

14 December

Review: Roundtable on Gender & ICTs with Chat Garcia Ramilo (APC)

Gender & ICTs, ICT4D

Last November 29, the Chair organized a Roundtable on Gender & ICTs and invited Mrs. Chat Garcia Ramilo, from Association for Progressive Communications (APC).

Here you can listen to the full roundtable and take a look at some photos of the session.

Full Roundtable and discussion: (Blip.tv)

http://blip.tv/file/4492307

Photos of the session: (Flickr)
http://www.flickr.com/photos/uocunescochair/sets/72157625568302952/detail/

25 January

Selection of Conferences 2010

Education Worldwide

Dear all,

We made a selection of events that will take place during this 2010. The events selected are mainly focussed on Education and ICTs, OER and ICTs and developing countries. We hope they will be of your interest.