Web roundup: my top picks

With e-Skills Week only just out of the way, I have little time to scan the blogosphere - but these caught my eye:

• New research on 1:1 computing indicates that students in such programmes outperform their peers. My colleague Riina Vuorikarii has just launched a new project with ACER to look at 1:1 computing in EU schools too, and has a great new website with technical support, learning resources and more.
• Skeptical video from Australian TV show 'Hungry Beast' about Google's expansion and involvement in many industries. I'm dependent on Google services online so it's an interesting reminder.
• Interview with researcher Ying-Ta Wu on how grid computing can fight dengue fever and enable international data sharing 
• The annual Reporters without Borders report on web freedom highlights that even democratic countries like Australia and South Korea are now cracking down on online expression.

e-Skills Week: podcast interview

Interested to hear me waffle on about e-Skills, geekery and why tech is cool? You can download an interview I did for e-Skills Week, as part of the e-Skills Week podcast series.

• Listen to the interview
• Get the full list of podcasts and videocasts

Socialnomics: the impact of social networks

As we get ready for e-Skills Week, Martha Lane Fox tweeted a link to this great video from Erik Qualman, the author of Socialnomics - an excellent book and blog on social media. It's from last year, but it summarises really well some of the key facts about social networks - not to mention it has a nice Fatboy Slim track to keep you interested while you watch! Not strictly education, but social media is totally pervasive in Europe nowadays so important for all of us.

What is nanotech? Stephen Fry explains!

For the Nanoyou project, our partners at the University of Cambridge Cavendish Lab have produced this fabulous video, narrated by Stephen Fry. Not only does it explain succintly what nanotech is, but it's all rounded off with a great soundtrack...

NANOYOU - Narrated by Stephen Fry from NANOYOU on Vimeo.

eTwinning: explaining teacher cooperation in animation

We've been releasing a lot of clips recently at European Schoolnet, and one I'm especially pleased with is this one for eTwinning, done together with Dog Studio. The idea was to make a short clip that explained, with no words, what eTwinning is about. The team did a really great job.

Watch the clip, and see if you think it explains the project!



Visit the eTwinning website to know more and get involved in school cooperation projects

e-Skills Week video clip: IT's your future!

The whole team is working really hard on the e-Skills Week campaign to raise awareness of IT careers, and have just released a promotional video clip to share around.



Visit the e-Skills website!

Best of the rest: fortnightly roundup

There are so many terrific bloggers out there now, just keeping up with them is really tough. Here are some of my favourite posts from this last fortnight:

• Erik Duval on 'Future of interoperability: food for thought' - talking about standardisation of learning content
• Suw Charman Anderson on 'Social media and productivity' - what's the link between the two?
• 'The most ugly and useless infographic competition winners' from Information Aesthetics
• 'Life on the net is too short' by Harold Jarche
• Ina Fried on 'Marko, the 9-year-old systems engineer'

Addressing gender issues in technology

Recent research from IDC (PDF) indicates that within the next five years, 90% of jobs in Europe will require IT skills and there are not enough skilled people on the job market. At the same time, there are few women participating in IT-based careers - more involvement from them could improve the situation (see my previous post on the European Schoolnet/Cisco research on this topic).

I've recently joined the executive committee of the European Centre for Women and Technology, a Norway-based non-profit aiming to improve women's participation in the knowledge economy and the IT industry. ECWT organises numerous activities through its member companies and organisations across the EU, including:

• The European Directory for Women in Technology, a platform for women to network, find out more about training opportunities, and for organisations looking for e-Skilled women to find appropriate candidates.
• The gender component of e-Skills Week, as well as providing the national contact points for Portugal and France
• The Code of best practices, a voluntary agreement from IT companies such as Microsoft, Google, etc. The agreement commits them to implement a range of diversity practices, including the encouragment of girls and women in education and training, implement gender neutral recruitment policies and encourage work/life balance as well as family-friendly approaches.
 

INSPIRE report on motivating students to learn maths, science and technology using learning resources

Inspire (Innovative Science Pedagogy in Research and Education) aimed to develop and experiment new teaching methods in the field of maths, science and technology (MST).

The purpose was to challenge the lack of interest among students to start scientific studies and to extend the supply of scientific specialists and to develop a scientific culture in European countries.

During a period of ten months Inspire:
* Observed the impact of new teaching methods on pupils and on their motivation.
* Analysed the pre-requisites to be defined for enabling teachers to integrate these new techniques in their pedagogy.
* Identified the critical success factors to be mastered at the level of the teacher and the school for the generalization of such practices.

This report describes the final results of the research project, examining the impact of various digital learning resources on science teaching and learning.

Download the full report (PDF) or take a look online below.

Data Protection Day 2010

Young people aged between 15 and 19 years olds are invited to take part in the Data Protection competition organised to celebrate Data Protection Day on 28 January 2010. The competition will run from 1 October 2009 to 5 January 2010. This is one of the promo clips for the event! Visit the website at http://dpd.eun.org.

Great ideas for science education: free eBook

Want some new ideas for science teaching and learning? Take a look at this selection of practices, specially picked by the STELLA science education research team. They've scoured the EU to identify some of the most successful approaches to science teaching, and presented them in a lively way. Some of the notable ones are teaching physics through karate, and using collaborative approaches such as eTwinning to liven up teaching with international experiences. The practices are selected on the basis of being easily transferable and replicable in different circumstances and cultures. The practices cover both primary and secondary education.

My colleagues Agueda Gras Valezquez, Caroline Kearney and I also co-wrote a paper to close the eBook looking at how ICT-based tools can improve students' motivation to learn science.

Download the full PDF version

Download the executive summary

e-Skills Week

I'm running this campaign, taking place in March 2010.

"The e-Skills Week campaign aims to raise awareness of the growing demand of highly skilled ICT practitioners and users within the industry. DIGITALEUROPE and European Schoolnet have come together with 20 national partners to promote e-skills whilst building bridges between the different stakeholders. The culmination of the campaign will be the European e-Skills Week taking place in the first week of March 2010."

One of the highlights will be an event in Brussels where we'll invite young people and teachers to tinker with technology, in a creative and stimulating location - the brand new Square venue. Prizes are on offer for students and businesses doing uber-creative things with tech. We're aiming for a kind of SXSW for kids, with a big party closing the event.

More info...

European Journal of Education: special volume on networks in education

'Networks in Education: benefits and issues in Europe' is the theme of this quarter's issue of the European Journal of Education. My colleagues and I at European Schoolnet have published a paper available in this issue.

Here's the full reference:

European Schoolnet: enabling school networking
Abstract
SANTI SCIMECA, PETRU DUMITRU, MARC DURANDO, ANNE GILLERAN, ALEXA JOYCE, RIINA VUORIKARI
Published Online: Nov 6 2009 6:53AM
DOI: 10.1111/j.1465-3435.2009.01407.x

How Can ICT in Education Excite Girls and Boys?

"Look at any ICT-enabled school classroom, and there is often a greater excitement for the technology with boys than girls, which by middle or secondary school, can translate into ICT tools being an exclusive domain of boys, excluding half the learning population from their benefit. How can technologists and educators design more gender neutral, or pro-female ICT-enabled learning experiences?"

This is the opening statement of the latest discussion on the UNESCO/InfoDev Education Technology Debate. Brooke Partridge (CEO of Vital Wave Consulting) and myself are the opinion contributors in this debate. Join in and contribute your thoughts!

Photo by Starbooze

eLearning Awards - win prizes for technology

For the ninth consecutive year, European Schoolnet is organising the eLearning Awards, Europe's leading competition to reward excellence and best use of technology in education. Schools and teacher training institutions are invited to take part and register at http://elearningawards.eun.org to present their best projects making use of ICT for teaching and learning.

Creative approaches to chemistry education

Today I'm at the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry's General Assembly in Glasgow, where we are planning the 2011 International Year of Chemistry. A lot of exciting ideas are being discussed and you can already see some of the projects and events planned, together with UNESCO.

Here, we've been talking about various chemistry outreach programmes, based on cutting edge topics and creative approaches, which hope to contribute to the year. There are too many to mention in detail, but they include:

• Children challenging industry is a UK-based project run by the University of York's Chemical Industry Education Centre. Primary school children visit local companies and take part in hands-on chemistry experiments, while their teachers can get constant support from a CCI coordinator.


• Xperimania - a project I run at European Schoolnet in cooperation with CEFIC. Children are challenged to create their own experiments to investigate the properties of materials. The competition is now closed but all the teaching guides and tools are still available.


• The British Royal Society of Chemistry has an excellent set of resources for students and teachers. They provide homework help, games, teacher training and much more.

Educational Technology Debate: low cost devices for developing countries

Educational Technology Debate (ETD) "exploring ICT and learning in developing countries" has been launched by UNESCO and InfoDev following the World Summit for the Information Society stakeholder meeting in Geneva last year.

The current topic is computer ratios: will 1:1 generate new models of education? The key experts are Mark Beckford (Ncomputing) and Walter Bender (MIT/OLPC/Sugar Labs).

Over the next months, the ETD site will host debates on a range of key ICT in education issues such as:

• Free and open source software vs. proprietary solutions


• How can ICT excite girls and boys?


• Unintended consequences of ICT in education

Experts are invited to send in articles or to share views with others via the commenting features. The editors include Mike Trucano (World Bank) and Wayan Vota (OLPC/Inveneo) so the debate is sure to be engaging and high quality.

ICT gender gap: stereotyped thinking continues to impact females’ choice of tech careers

My team at European Schoolnet just completed our white paper financed by Cisco.

From the press release:

"A high number of female students are not pursuing further studies or careers in the information and communications technology (ICT) sector, despite having good basic computing skills, according to a study and white paper by European Schoolnet, commissioned by Cisco. The study can be downloaded from www.eun.org/whitepaper."

Some key recommendations from the report to address the problem:

• Public-private partnership could play a role in changing perceptions about industry, by giving access to more realistic and authentic information about ICT and ICT careers.


• Need to ensure accurate information about ICT is available to teachers, pupils and their parents.


• Numerous initiatives launched, but mainstreaming is required to have a systemic impact.

Data privacy on social networks

EU privacy regulators are trying to improve data privacy but suggest a rather impractical approach in my view. Data privacy law like this already applies to published photos in news outlets, but even those are nigh impossible to regulate and enforce.

What would you do if you have a photo of yourself with a crowd in the background - get permission from every one of the 100 people in the photo before uploading? Not really thought out. What about people who are not using the platform, how could you get the permission verified? No obvious system to deal with that.

The old but very useful recommendation of having profiles default on private would do much more to solve the problem, as well as being able to categorise types of freinds: then people would be sharing photos with friends only, or subsets of friends, rather than the whole world/Google crawlers. And of course, educate people about privacy through initiatives like Data Privacy/Protection Day - the 2010 initiative is being supported by Microsoft and European Schoolnet (see European Schoolnet's site for last year.

Cory Doctorow on open education

I recently wrote a few questions for Cory Doctorow, for a video message for the European Schoolnet International Symposium for ICT in Education Networks. Take a look!