Future Educators’ Explaning Voices
So that future educators are able to elaborate a professional identity which encompasses the pedagogical uses of technology among their range of ordinary duties, their educators should provide them with an environment that favors enough flexibility to self expression and serve as a meta-exercise, through which future educators can elaborate new appreciations of the role of teachers and the purposes of education in the digital age. Guiding students in the understanding of their own voices can be an exercise that leads to the development of a more critical and reflexive professional identity.
Higher education professionals and researchers should not take for granted that as students live surrounded by technology, using them on a daily basis, they should have favorable perceptions on their educational use. Whatever level of familiarity future educators have with technology when they come to the university, they also bring some preconceptions and misconceptions on what literacy means and on what are the means of literacy. It is important to bridge students’ previous knowledge, which is both technical but also philosophical, regarding technologies to richer levels of understanding of the role of twentieth first century educators. Podcasts seem to offer a tool just as good to build such a bridge.
de Oliveira, J., Buenestado, P. & Camacho, M. (2013). Future Educators’ Explaning Voices. In Proceedings of IADS Mobiles Learning. (pp. 143-147). Lisboa: IADIS.
Challenges of educational use of 3D virtual environments
The incorporation of simulation environments to the teaching-learning process redefines relationships and forms of interaction between teacher and students and also between students themselves. In this new article we present a reflection on the interaction in these environments, the reasons for its use with pedagogical purposes and the obstacles that educators might encounter making use of them. To preserve their educational potential, taking in account that 3D environments introduce a reality not comparable to everyday life, it is important to avoid transporting pre-existing educative models. Information and communication technologies, while expanding the potential of the classroom, require the design of a new pedagogical model that reconsiders every day thinking practices.
Wisdom Society
This is something I have been thinking about lately, I just can’t give up on the idea.
The thing is that it seems to me we have made a good job implementing information society in just a few decades. In comparison to the thousands of years necessary to implement the agricultural society, or the hundreds of years it took us to promote industrial society, information society just seems to go on wheels. The next step to knowledge society seems to be just around the corner or here already, can anybody be absolutely sure? But my problem is that I do not see the same progress in the direction of a wisdom society. And today, while I was listening to Matthew Taylor, twitted by Gavin Heaton I thought to myself, “that’s it”. There might be more people around who just think all this information and knowledge is of no use if we can’t teach people and ourselves to be peaceful, respectful, solidary, open-hearted… And maybe I’m a dreamer, but I’m sure I’m not the only one.
Mathew mentions the social aspiration gap, that is, the gap between the kind of aspirations we have (the kind of society we want to live in) and the trajectory on which our current behavior places us. I have high aspirations for our society but I don’t feel intellectually committed to them. I’ve been emotionally and spiritually committed to a more peaceful world, but not intellectually. Today I want to make a point for wisdom society, where knowledge reminds us of our humanity and enables us to live it fully. In wisdom society, knowledge enables us to combine responsible and trusted authority, share commitment to mutual support and capture the firepower of individual ambition – like Mathew says. The things you learn when you host the Olimpic games… Just hope brazil can learn as much…
Today I’ve realized how big the social aspiration gap is in my case. I will work to reduce this gap from now on. Yes I will.
A case study in progress
It is out of question that some new technologies help some people learn in some instances and that new technologies 
offer different potentials for learning. These new potentials require a re-thinking of what it means to learn. I’d expect people use of representational and communicative modes of new technologies to re-shape the social interaction experience of the classroom in some ways. E-books are one of such new technologies. Nobody is really sure about the future and the impact of e-books, but there is increasing awareness that e-books demand further attention. As educators and researchers embark on a more extensive engagement with e-books, it has progressively become clear that it is important to understand how new forms of reading and the possibilities of working with multiple formats that go beyond the text change literacy practices in the schools. My colleague Mar Camacho and I are presently developing a case study to dig into how e-textbooks are being used in classroom and what the perceptions of teachers and students of teaching and learning with them are. You can read my colleague’s post on our visit here.
As our case sample, we chose the public primary school Escola Dr. Alberich i Casas, in Reus, based on three criteria:
- the school has a pedagogical project which provides for the use of technology for teaching and learning;
- the school has implemented a one-to-one technology initiative; and
- the school is considering the use of e-textbooks.
The school staff, the teacher and the kids have been lovely, collaborating in every step of this initial research. We are still working on the data analysis, but as soon as we have some results, we will surely share them in the academic context and here, of course.
My own TIES 2012
Hi there,
TIES 2012 is now over. You know I love congresses, but this one was special in one particular regard for me: I’m a big
Punya Mishra
fan, in a perfectly professional academic way, of Punya Mishra and TPACK, and as I was participating in the organizing committee of this congress, I suggested him as a key note speaker. Surprisingly for me, many of my colleagues did not know of him or his research and I thought that was a great opportunity to bring America closer to Europe. I was not wrong. Punya did generously accept our invitation and now he has many more fans just like me this side of the Atlantic, because his presentation was just what I knew it was going to be: Inspirational! There are people you listen to that make you want to do better, to change things for better… Punya makes me want to be a better teacher, to learn more, to explore more, to innovate and share more.
TIES 2012 was also special in this one thing too: it was very participatory. There was plenty of time for discussion after the presentations – I was in some very interesting discussion rooms-, but there were also moments to continue discussion, like the “meet the expert” and “Discuss” spaces. The conclusions of the congresses, which the organizing committee went gathering and elaborating every day over lunch were discussed and completed in an open session which closed the meeting. They will be published in the TIES 2012 web page soon.
After three days of intense discussion and months of preparation, we ended Friday 3rd worn out. Even so, I was so happy for managing to hold on to the end. People who are able to persist till the very last minute of a congress leave with a feeling of “duty done” that feels just fine.
TIES 2012 left me with a philosophical question… In many presentations and discussions I noticed a tension between control and freedom, creativity and usability, learners’ or market driven pedagogical approaches… Where do we find the correct balance between those forces in our educational practices? How do they affect my pedagogical practices? There are no easy answers for those questions, but that is the thrill of the academic work… Every new piece of information you have produce many new questions to think about. Keep thinking, let’s keep thinking you guys!
And take a lot of care!
=)
All roads leat to… Aveiro
Afternoon in Aveiro
I spent July doing research on the application of simulation environments like Second Life in education, at the Universidade de Aveiro, Portugal. My colleague Teresa Bettencourt invited me to a conference on academic writing and I said, yes, off course. It turns out that the professor presenting the conference, doctor Désirée Motta-Roth, had been in the examining committee of my dissertation back in 2003! You know, Brazil is a very small country… She works in the south of Brazil, at the Universidade Federal de Santa Maria. When we met almost ten years ago, I was presenting my dissertation in the southeast of Brazil, at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais. Since then, after I finished my PhD, for the last four years I’ve worked as a research fellow at the Universitat Rovira I Virgili, in Tarragona, Spain… till we met again in this precious Portuguese village, Aveiro. By the way, the most astonishing thing is that professor Motta-Roth looks younger then I remembered her almost a decade ago! I do have a picture with her, but I lost the cable to take it from my camera, urrrgh!!! Sorry for that! I have pictures of my stay instead.
Campus of the Universidade de Aveiro
Professor Motta-Roth spoke for an attentive audience of about one hundred scholars about genre theory and academic writing, revisiting professor Swales founding work – read my post on his visit to the Universitat Pompeu Fabra.
At the end of the conference, I had the chance to speak to her and we hug each other happy for having taken the same road to Aveiro. They say “all roads lead to Rome”, but it is not true, all roads lead to Aveiro.
Ed-Media 2011, Lisbon, Portugal
Ooohh boy, I love congresses! Call me freaky if you like, but it thrills me being in a place where everybody comes to share the things they have thought and to listen and discuss their mates’ thoughts too. I had a great time attending Ed-Media 2011. My presentation was on a project-to be, a research which we hope to have funds to develop. Then I concentrated my schedule attendance on Virtual Words, as I also participate in Simul@, a research project that aims at evaluating transversal competencies through the use of 3D tools.
Something all presentations made evident is that students enjoy learning through virtual worlds. David W. Deeds and Alexander Makosz are two of the most enthusistic I’ve ever seen. They have used Segond Life and Atlantics Quest and report some very interesting appointments on the experiences. Take a look at what they say about students motivation “We literally have to drag students away when classes finish, and I do mean sometimes kicking and screaming”. Nick Zap and Jillianne Code, who made the most interesting presentation I attendend, take 3D representations as cognitive tools. As they say, “stereoscopic technologies provide educators with a tool in which to explore content, that are engaging and immersive”, but “The benefits of using such technologies have implications beyond their intended curricular applications. The implicit curriculum that emerges from students interacting with complex media has lasting impressions beyond the content of the lesson.”
Sofia Nteliopoulou and Dr. Avgoustos Tsinakos make a fine review of the literature on Second Life and present some of the virtual environment’s components quoted as facilitators of innovations in pedagogy:
- Extended or rich interactions: opportunities for social interaction between individuals and communities, human–object interaction and also intelligent interaction between artefacts
- Visualization and contextualization: the production and reproduction of inaccessible content that may be historically lost, too distant, too costly, imaginary, futuristic or impossible to see by the human eye
- Exposure to authentic content and culture
- Individual and collective identity play
- Immersion in a 3-D environment where the augmented sense of presence, through virtual embodiment in the form of an avatar and extensive modes of communication, can impact on the affective, empathic and motivational aspects of the experience
- Simulation: reproduction of contexts that can be too costly to reproduce in real life with the advantages that some physical constraints can be overcome
- Community presence: promoting a sense of belonging and purpose that coheres around groups, subcultures and geography
- Content production: opportunities for creation and ownership of the learning environment and objects within it that are both individual and owned.
The guys presenting Mind your game, game your mind! made a great presentation too introducing GeoEduc3D and reporting on a research that aims at stimulating student interest in, and deepen their understanding of, geomatic methods and technology through geomatics-enabled mobile games.
If you are interested in the field of Virtual worlds, you’ll probably like to check on these presentations too. Here is a list of papers which are worth revising:
That’s all folks! Have fun! =)
