Tag Archives: IX International Seminar (2012)
IX International Seminar - Edited Videos Released
Education Worldwide
We are releasing the final edited version of the video sessions of the last IX International Seminar: Transformative Changes in Education: System-wide Approach, which was held last November in Barcelona at the Media-TIC building.
You can find the videos in the website of the IX Intl. Seminar.
Please note that the recording of the sessions was made by one of our media partners, who offered to take charge of all the recording process. Unfortunately, all videos (except a couple of them) are only available in Spanish language, due to the simultaneous translation directly applied to the recording. We apologize for any inconvenience.
Yong Zhao: World Class Education: Educating Creative and Entrepreneurial Students
Education Worldwide
Notes from ‘Yong Zhao: World Class Education: Educating Creative and Entrepreneurial Students‘ by Gerard Pagès i Camps
Yong Zhao is currently Presidential Chair and Associate Dean for Global Education, College of Education at the University of Oregon. Zhao has published over 20 books and 100 articles. His most recent books include Catching Up or Leading the Way: American Education in the Age of Globalization and the Handbook of Asian Education.
The world needs creative and entrepreneurial talents who are globally competent to take advantage of the opportunities brought about technology and globalization and tackle the tough challenges facing human beings. But our schools are being pushed to produce homogenous, compliant, and employee-minded test-takers, as a result of seductive power of the traditional education paradigm. In this presentation, Dr. Yong Zhao challenges the traditional paradigm, debunks the myth of international tests such as PISA and TIMSS, and proposes a new paradigm of education aimed to cultivate diverse, creative, and entrepreneurial talents.
The world is changing.
Human nature embraced diversity. Is lot of talent everywhere: ‘I don’t believe that only one Shakespeare was born in the world!’
Economy changed: we allowed machines to do things, we automated lot of simple task and not so simple. Plus, there is a global distribution of labor.
Zhao explained a personal point of view: ‘I come from a small town in China. They don’t have access to art or culture, then they became a cheap labor force’. Routine jobs are replaced by automation or cheap labor force.
Information is everywhere. If you can ‘google’ everything, why teachers are needed? ‘The role of teachers should change!’
And the world went global. Now is a global competition. The economy of necessity versus the economy of abundance… where we are producing the things we don’t need. But that generate lots of jobs! Lots of new professions as Life Coach… how many writers, how many TV shows, how many TV cooking programs we can see? We have lots of new psychological needs.
The world is changing, and all the factors described together means… Why we standardize education? Because everyone, everywhere can compete. To increase competition. Because we love ranking. People loves ranking. Governments loves rankings.
But when government improves education there are some side effects.
After a few studies relative mathematical skills in American and Asian students (to compare them) showed a correlation: the fewer people are doing their math more confidant they are in they own skills.
There is a new class. The entrepreneurship mass. With lots of confidence, true, but with friends and a risk-taking attitude. With passion, empathy and unique ideas. And Creativity. They are the creativity classe.
The change of economy requires a new kind of people.
But they are not an elite. Everyone can be entrepreneur. ‘If Lady Gaga is useful, everybody is useful!’
Education is not about to fix people, is about to support them.
Dr. Zhao’s presentations is based on the massive amount of evidence from a variety of sources he gathered for his new book World Class Learners: Educating Creative and Entrepreneurial Students (Corwin, 2012) and his Catching Up or Leading the Way: American Education in the Age of Globalization (ASCD, 2009).
Presentation in pdf of the Mr Zhao Barcelona, Spain, UOC-UNESCO Seminar, you can find more interesting presentations from Yong Zhao on his web site
Kurt Fischer: Connecting Mind, Brain, and Education
Education Worldwide
Notes from ‘Kurt Fischer: Connecting Mind, Brain, and Education‘ by Gerard Pagès i Camps
Kurt Fischer leads an international movement to connect biology and cognitive science to education, and is founding editor of the journal Mind, Brain, and Education (Blackwell) As Director of the Mind, Brain, and Education Program and Charles Bigelow Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, he does research on cognition, emotion, and learning and their relation to biological development and educational assessment.
Actually we are treating student as disembodied brains into which we pump knowledge. A better model is active intelligence. Learning experiences literally shape how neurons in the brain connect with one another. Learning requires building a new network on our brain.
There are some Illegitimate claims from neuroscience:
- Learning involves filling our brains with Knowledge – not true
- There are left-brain and right brain people – no true
- We only use half or less of our brains – not true
- Boys & girls have fundamentally different brains – not true
In his research he has discovered a general scale that provides tools for assessing learning and development in any domain. Among his other discoveries are that people move through different learning pathways while at the same time they show common (universal) processes of learning and development.
From the visual recognition the brain starts to work in every part of it, like an orchestra. The different parts of the brain work together.
Q: how the activity varies from individual to individual?
Fischer: the animation I showed… every person has a different approach to learning. We have a focus on difference. Different people learn differently.
Need for research schools: research and development for schools… this is a call! Research and development are commonplace in most industries and fields. Educational theory should be tested by its consequences in action. Educating 25% of our students successfully is not good enough!
That’s way Is necessary to analyze the brain looking for patterns instead than locations… patters show us what we do while learning. And to understand the brain pathways can help us to design better education models.
Recommended readings:
Azra Naseem: Changing Pedagogy Through Faculty Professional Development in Blended Learning
Education Worldwide
Notes from ‘Azra Naseem: Changing Pedagogy Through Faculty Professional Development in Blended Learning‘ by Gerard Pagès i Camps
Azra Naseem is a faculty member at the Aga Khan University (AKU) Pakistan. She also holds a management portfolio of Head eLearning and Open Learning at AKU Institute for Educational Development (AKU-IED) .In this presentation Azra showcase the Aga Khan University’s (AKU) ( www.aku.edu ) faculty development programme in Blended Learning (BL). The aim of the program is to enable faculty members to design, teach and evaluate blended learning (BL) courses in their areas of expertise.
A blended learning approach combines face-to-face classroom methods with computer-mediated activities to form an integrated instructional approach.
The first pilot program started in 2011 and ended in May 2012. The first cohort had fifteen faculty members from the Schools of Nursing and Midwifery (in Pakistan, Kenya, Tanzania & Uganda), Institutes for Educational Development (in Pakistan & Tanzania), Medical College (Pakistan), Community Health Sciences (Pakistan), and the Examination Board (Pakistan). The faculty members were mentored, over a period of nine months, by a team of academics, educational technologists, IT, library and administrative support staff and a research officer, to re-design and offer existing face-to-face courses as blended learning courses and conduct research.
The program started with a two-week online learning phase in September 2011. This was followed by a two-week face-to-face workshop in Karachi Pakistan.
The courses focused in:
- Course design
- Course development
- Course facilitation and assessment
- And research practice
The faculty members were given a handheld device to mitigate the connectivity and electricity challenges in Pakistan and East Africa. From October 2011- May 15 2012 was the online phase.
Amongst the technology used was a divers amount of free software and open source tools in web authoring, multimedia development, conceptual maps, virtual learning environments and communication and collaboration. Because the technological difficulties, some pre 2.0 as forums where more useful to engage everyone in the course.
During this phase, the faculty members developed and taught courses through a blended learning approach. In May 2012, the final face-to-face workshop was conducted in Nairobi Kenya, where the faculty members reflected on their learning experience. At the end of the first cohort, we have learnt that BL would enable AKU to become a comprehensive university. As well, the situated nature of the faculty professional development program in BL would allow for transformative changes in pedagogy. The second cohort has started in August 2012, with minor modifications in the implementation plan.
In the presentation, the details of the professional development program, as it was implemented during September 2011 – May 2012, will be shared. The lessons learnt about how the program has initiated a process of educational change in the university, in a modest way, will also be discussed.
Challenges to face:
- Unstable and inadequate technology infrastructure
- Lack of appropriately qualified academic-IT staff
- Faculty and students’ readiness
- Traditional teaching and research policies and practice
- Distinctions between Academia and the major administrative units
As a conclusion she pointed:
- System-wide reforms are necessary for bringing pedagogical change through blended learning in higher education
- An effective BL program begins to break down barriers by requiring a greater level of cooperation and collaboration between all parties
- Students and faculty members need adequate support to adopt BL
Manuel Castells: Creative education for the Information Age: Mission Impossible?
Education Worldwide
Notes from ‘Manuel Castells: Creative education for the Information Age: Mission Impossible?‘ by Gerard Pagès i Camps
‘I’m going to talk about the Obstacles and let we will find the solutions’
Manuel Castells who understood very early in the 90’s that Internet is going to change everything and recently received the 2012 Holberg International Memorial Prize from the Parliament of Norway, pointed as a key idea of his speech how educational institutions can resist to change, can transform for change.
A recent study on education published in Science calculated that the amount of digital information in the world went from 52% of the total in 2002 to 07% in 2007.
New skills are needed to be able to select and recombine information, to be capable to create new knowledge and meaning. And education is absolutely central.
Education is the critical matter for equality of opportunities.
Looking to the Finnish secondary education system for some answers to their success Castells said to find only one answer: ‘the fundamental key is the quality of the teachers, and this quality comes from they enthusiasm and the social recognition of the teacher role in society’.
- Social recognition is the key
- Technology will not solve this problem
In other hand universities have to consider universities themselves as a system. Research in university is the source, and this important, but is a higher system, of teaching and learning, a network.
The university system is the fundamental key of the education system, and is facing some problems:
- Is not adapting to society and his reality
- Is keeping professorial privileges
- Is not adapted to technology
- Is not listening to the demands of society
- And is not sensible to the interest of the students
Why it happens?
Tremendous market pressure is to destroy universities to transform it into a commodity. Oligarcs are brutal and ignorants and they buy universities as they buy football clubs!
We have to preserve universities from the river of pirañas who want to sell them by pieces.
- Production of values
- The university as productive force
- The university that connects knowledge to the ability to create profit companies and good administration models.
The critical point pointed by Castells: Universities help to create the person, flexible, adaptable in the long life… not only well organized mentally… a person able to change professions not only jobs.
To be flexible because we have to be ready for everything. And strong because life events will change some personal values but a person have to keep some few fundamental values untouched.
Universities need autonomy to develop. Autonomy from government, autonomy from bureaucracy and autonomy from the markets.
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IX International Seminar
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