Open Dialog as a Tool for University Education Danuse Bauerova1, Maria Luisa Sein-Echaluce2 VSB – Technical University, Sokolska 33, 701 21 Ostrava, Czech Republic1, C.P.S. University of Zaragoza, María de Luna, 3, 50018 Zaragoza, Spain2
[email protected],
[email protected] Have well prepared teachers and students for a society based on knowledge. During the education process, students and teachers must go through several stages (see Figure 1) which are summarized in the following actions: collect, relate, create and donate the knowledge to the corporation to enrich the global knowledge and, at the same time, be the information source for other people [1].
Abstract. The job as a 'teacher' can change from being 'the source of knowledge' to being an influencer. Students have a personal way that addresses their own learning needs, and moderating discussions and activities in a way that collectively leads students towards the learning goals. The changes that higher education is going through towards a learning process based on dialogue and the changes of paradigm are presented.
The principles of SHARING cannot function until there exists a model of education that is based on KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
Keywords. Web 2.0, eLearning, networked learning, online dialog, knowledge management, sharing, colaborative learning, participation, reflection, higher education, Internet software.
1. Introduction
COLLECT
Society is enriched when the knowledge of its professionals and members in general grows, which is made possible by continuous learning. The education in the ‘knowledge society’ only starts when the dialogue appears from a social point of view. The changes that new network technologies produce in the higher education and the potential that this creates for longlife learning are treasures for this knowledge society.
RELATE
CREATE
DONATE
VIRTUAL BRAIN OF CORPORATION
Figure 1. Educational Proces
3. New paradigms in the education process
2. An architecture of dialog learning
The step to a new education model which is centred on learning, instead of teaching, which has been established in the European Higher Education Area (EHEA), requires cultural changes in every person because objectives of students, teachers and institutions are changing. Structured and useful arguments, previous negotiating, study of impact, and actions to obtain a deep comprehension and the construction of advanced knowledge in a collaborative environment are needed. Occasionally, learning environments based on the web are used to make it easier for students to access materials of a course which, in many cases, are ‘re-packaged’, namely, using the
“An architecture of dialogue learning, as a basis for the collaborative learning on Internet, is the most appropriate methodology for adult students in continuous and higher education.” Therefore, this online learning process, in its different modalities as distance or blended education, should: Establish synchronous and asynchronous communication technologies. Agree with teaching-learning methodologies. Create online collaborative dialogues as the centre of a learning process. Use appropriate technological tools which allow sharing knowledge.
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The experience acquired in isolation, in front of the interconnections of lifelong learning in the new model. The subject-oriented education with individual disciplines gives way to the intertwining of disciplines. Facing the individual development, now the team collaborates to solve problems taking advantage of the mutual inspiration of team members. The educational process centred on the teacher is substituted by the emphasis on student. The individual approach becomes important as opposed to the old way of teaching the same course to all students. The discovery path is influenced by individual interests, capacities and the abilities of students themselves (with the “mere” support from educators). In the traditional system reactions and changes are slow (for example, to students’ progress) meanwhile the new systems allows a fast reaction and interaction. Fixed limits of knowledge and skills which students are supposed to acquire are now substituted by flexible limits. Namely, the learning pathway goes through a knowledge management system.
traditional formats and methodology. But the experiences and the access to more opened information have changed, and new models are demanded.
3.1. New role of educators As established in the constructionist philosophy: ‘the job as a 'teacher' can change from being 'the source of knowledge' to being an influencer and role model of class culture, connecting with students in a personal way that addresses their own learning needs, and moderating discussions and activities in a way that collectively leads students towards the learning goals of the class’. Therefore, the teacher is not ‘the wizard on the stage’. He provides support to educational activities: He refrains from supplying sources and tools. He devotes her/his time to motivating the individual works of students! He strives to fulfil the role: show me, assist me and leave me alone.
3.2. What do we want for our courses? The most important aspect of online education and training: the ability to take into account different people’s perspectives to face a problem or issue, regardless of time or place constraints and in a context conducive to reflection and discussion. In Table 1 some aspects of the transition in the education model are shown [1].
3.3. The quality of education Actually, the good quality of contents, in the sense of rich sources of information, is the most important criterion to determine the distinction of a course. Nevertheless, in the new model the quality is mainly measured by the type of students’ work and how the teacher drives them. In addition, checking the students’ work performance is main measure of their learning, while the basis of their progress should be focused on stimulating their self-motivation.
Table 1. Educational model evolution
OLD model of education curriculum stand alone experience discipline based individual development instructor led one size fits all slow to change boundary constrained
NEW model of education learning solution bridged and lifelong learning discipline blended problem solving in teams learner-centred individual focus quick response flexible boundaries
3.4. New model of education The new education model is based on knowledge management. The knowledge may be considered as the only resource which GROWS when it is: shared, transferred and manager with ability [3]. This is when the information becomes knowledge. As Moreno [12] says, the teacher should: show different learning processes to his students,
From contents previously fixed in a course, the new model offers constructive activities in real time which enrich the contents of the course. It provides a personalized curriculum.
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orient and tutorize them, coordinate and supervise the students work, have characteristics of ‘good listener’, as well as good organizer, manager and moderator, be tolerant.
for the elderly. The education leads to a ‘global open dialogue’.
4. Technology allows the changes ‘People are changing, they absorb information quickly, in images, video, text and from multiple sources simultaneously. They expect instant responses and feedback. They prefer random ‘on demand’ access to media and expect to be in constant communication with their friends’ [7]. At present, the dominant learning technology is a type of system which organizes and distributes online courses through learning management systems (LMS). The content is organized according to the traditional model and entirely taught online or with traditional seminars, led by an instructor and following a specific program, in order to be completed during a prefixed period of time [7]. Many of available support systems seem to be focused on the teacher, with excellent software tools to present information and multimedia resources, to make automatic multiple choice questionnaires, to obtain reports of students’ use, etc, but they put much less attention on tools and software to support the interaction and collaboration from a perspective focused on the student. As mentioned previously, the most effective education model is one where the instant communication is the centre of the process [1]. In that sense, technology must be adapted to this fact and, although the use of Internet is usually limited to read information, things change substantially if the intervention is more direct. I am writing on the web! So. I am starting a dialogue!
3.5. The own student´s responsibility The new role of the teacher as a guide to manage the course seems to be clear. The teacher cannot design the learning process but the student should build it by himself with the help of the teacher. The own student’s responsibility is essential in the process. This new paradigm of teaching-learning process is difficult for all, teachers and students, but there is an important goal to obtain: being prepared for the ‘lifelong learning’ (learning to learn and to continue lifelong learning). With respect to the demand of an active participation from the students in their formative process, some previous studies say that, on average, we retain 10% of what we read, 20% of what we hear, 30 % of what we see, 50% of what we see and hear, 70 % of what we say, 90% of what we say and do [4].
3.6. School leadership Gibson [9] uses several examples, such as the Global Forum on School Leadership (GFSL), to illustrate how the professionals of education need to re-evaluate their own approaches to teaching on Internet. It’s important that people admit the individual fights needed to modify and adjust the world educational opinions and their derived behaviour in an increasingly interrelated World. In order to reach the creation of collaborative knowledge and to increase its quality and its quantity, the research groups of the VSBTechnical University Ostrava and the University to Zaragoza, to which the authors of this paper belong to, see education as an open process. The courses are changing, focusing on the students, instead of teacher. In the centre of the process these two groups ask how they can improve the participation of students and how they should persuade them to reflect their experiences on Internet. The aim is the creation of their own knowledge and subsequent sharing of it in collaborative work. The special attention to individual differences and abilities is important. This recognition mainly leads to ‘lifelong learning’, well understood not only as education
4.1. Web 2.0 – web of data Web 2.0 appeared as a response to the demand of change [13], but what is Web 2.0? The concept of Web 2.0 began with a conference brainstorming session between O'Reilly and MediaLive International. In the year and a half since its conception, the term "Web 2.0" has clearly taken hold, with more than 9.5 million citations in Google. But there's still a huge amount of disagreement about just what Web 2.0 means. O’Reilly says that Web 2.0 is not only a technological revolution but a social revolution. In the Table 2 is a short list of elements which are included in Web 2.0 and its previous version.
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Table 2. Differencies between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 (O´Reilly, 2005)
Web 1.0 mp3.com Britannica Online personal websites domain name speculation page views screen scraping publishing content management systems directories (taxonomy)
MOODLE platform and doing the experimentation in the same educational environment [6]. The group of VSB-Technical University Ostrava uses the appropriate methodologies to obtain the objectives previously mentioned. There are many tools of web 2.0 technologies that have special emphasis but they were originated a long time ago. Not only practical multimedia and visual presentation help to enhance the learning process. Continuous feedback, that could be realised due to the new technology web 2.0, is essential. Web 2.0 is special software which allows students not only to explore the web and read new information but also to create and write it back on the web but with from a different point of view.
Web 2.0 Napster wikipedia blogging search engine optimization cost per click web services participation wikis tagging ("folksonomy")
4.3. Practical cases
The distribution of these elements in one of these two categories is difficult to do because Web 2.0 hasn’t got a hard boundary, but rather, a gravitational core made by principles such as ‘the web as platform’, ‘web services, no packaged software’ or ‘the user controls his own data’. ‘Netscape was the standard bearer for Web 1.0 and Google is most certainly the standard bearer for Web 2.0. You can visualize Web 2.0 as a set of principles and practices that tie together a veritable solar system of sites that demonstrate some or all of those principles, at a varying distance from that core’ [13]. On the other hand, the technologies associated with Web 2.0 show us that ‘the Web of documents has morphed into a Web of data. We are no longer just looking at the same old sources for information. Now we’re looking at a new set of tools to aggregate and remix microcontent in new and useful ways’ [11].
Several experiences at the Technical University of Ostrava based on the use of the online setting as a means for learners to create and publish material. Besides, students obtain their own webspace and use it for composing their team work. Students operate continuously on the internet, they create blogs describing their individual or team work during the course with the teacher’s participation. The terminology for example is created with wiki technology (software to create contents in a cooperative way) by both sides – teachers as well as students. Some activities using of wikis are presented in this - example: The students must learn what wiki is. The teacher and some students should open a web page with wiki The students are asked, after obtaining the principles of wiki from Wikipedia (2006), to contribute to it. Everybody has to include, for example, 3 terms with their descriptions or definition. Terminology was born! Or, at least, part of it. With respect to the use of blogs, the student: has to find out what blog is, has to prepare their own place for blogging, find some webtop application for blogging, for example MyOpera, has to open their own blog according to the instructions on the web, not the teacher’s instructions, has to write, for example, about their team work, about his problems etc. – every week
4.2. LMS Moodle Both research groups of Ostrava and Zaragoza use software with different characteristics as much in their teaching as in research tasks, and the MOODLE platform is the common work environment. The new education system demands tools to make cooperative work easier and improve knowledge management, in the way of annexed or integrated modules to the existing platforms. In that sense, the University of Zaragoza is carrying out a research project, in conjunction with groups of the Jaume I de Castellón and the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, by using the
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has to write one note about himself, one note about one of his team members. In that way, students have their own digital diary. The students like it and do it even after finishing this course.
As a consequence of this course, the same research group did a study of cooperative activities of teachers at the University of Zaragoza. That report [15] includes a general view of the first tools to make the cooperation easy, together with a statistic study of its use by teachers. The State of the art analysis of the use of technological resources, to support the cooperative work of teaching staff at the University, was the aim of that study. A test of more than a hundred of teachers was done and some meetings with coordinators and members of research and innovation groups at the University of Zaragoza were held. The study shows that currently there is a big ignorance about cooperative tools and their use. Many things should still be done by the institutions, teachers and students. The universities should increase training activities and technical and methodological support for teachers. The interest of teachers is growing by e-learning tools which allow them to do most of traditional teaching tasks but, still a ‘dialogue’ culture is not expanded enough to include the Web 2.0 tools in the research and teaching tasks. The research group at the Technical University of Ostrava has similar goals. They organize the courses for teachers and staff to achieve the goal to prepare people for their new roles. Emphasis is mainly placed on the necessity of new support for the educational process and for students as well. For many years we are organizing monthly seminars named VIRTUNIV [2]. Not only the Technical University takes a part in these seminars but the Silesian University, Opava, Ostrava University, Ostrava and Masaryk University, Brno as well. The goal is to improve knowledge and skills to use the information and communication technologies in education. The Technical University also organizes annually the successful Workshop Silesian Moodle Moot where people, thanks to their experiences, become more familiar and comfortable with this tool. The Institute for Innovation in Education at the VŠB – Technical University of Ostrava (Czech Rep) makes advances in education at University, by promoting new ways of using information Technology and activities in the format of teaching-learning.
5. Human resources development We have been talking about the use of cooperative work tools in the teaching-learning process, namely, in the teacher-student relation but… what happens with the relation between teachers? Are they using online new Technologies to coordinate their teaching? And their research? In 2004 a research group organized a course for teachers at the University of Zaragoza, the aim of which was to show different basic tools for cooperative work to university teachers in order to improve: their own work planning, collaboration with other colleagues and teaching. The used cooperative work platform let teachers through labels, search the contents and activities, depending on their format and other characteristics. In that way, information documents, user’s guides, instructions for activities, messages, could be found very easily [14]. The usage of different kinds of forums was one of the included activities on the course. Its nature depended on the initial objective and the platform allowed to create associated indexes to those forums, according to the classification previously established by the teacher (different types of debate), half-open or full-open when the forum’s users define the sections for indexes, depending on the subjects of the messages. Therefore a ‘Forum of doubts’ was used, and many teachers’ doubts on the usage of forums for tutorial tasks with students appeared. Sharing experiences from the members of the group enriched the conclusions of the activity. The ‘Forum of debate’ allowed the parts of groups to talk about different subjects related to new technologies for education and organize the answers in the most convenient manner. Finally, the ‘Forum to share contents’ allowed an easy way to include contents in the course for students or visitors. Previous agreements make the organization of contents easier.
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2006 Decembre 16-18. Tenerife, España; 2006. [7] Downes S. E-learning 2.0. eLearn magazine. http://www.elearnmag.org/subpage.cfm?sect ion=articles&article=29-1 [2006/11/09] [8] DSED; Dynamic Systems for E-Document. Inventa Soluciones S.L. http://www.inventasoluciones.com [2006/11/09] [9] Gibson, I. W. Preparing School leaders for new Millennium Learning. In Global Educator; ISSN 1449-5082. http://www.globaleducator.com [2006/11/09] [10] Gil, J.J., Fidalgo A. & Sein-Echaluce, M.L.. (2004) The knowledge Networks as an Innovation to Improve the Quality of University Teaching. In: Proceedings of ED MEDIA 2004 World Conference on Educational Multimedia, Hypermedia & Telecommunications. Lugano, Suiza; June 2004. http://dl.aace.org/16150 [2006/11/09] [11] Macmanus. & Porter J. Web 2.0 for Designers. Digital Web Magazine. 2005/May/4. http://www.digitalweb.com/articles/web_2_for_designers [2006/11/09] [12] Moreno, F., Santiago, R. Formación online. Guía para profesores universitarios. Publicaciones de la Universidad de La Rioja.2003 [13] O´ Reilly, T. What is Web 2.0. Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software. http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/ news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html [2006/11/09] [14] Sein-Echaluce M.L, Fidalgo A. & Gil J.J. DSED: A New Technological Platform for E-learning, Collaborative Work and Knowledge Management; ED MEDIA 2004 World Conference on Educational Multimedia, Hypermedia & Telecommunications. June. Lugano (Suiza); June 2004. http://dl.aace.org/15625 [2006/11/09] [15] TCRUZ: Trabajo cooperativo en red en la Universidad de Zaragoza. 2005. http://add.unizar.es:800/newweb/web/pesuz/ 2004/TrabCoopProfRedUZ.pdf [2006/11/09]
6. Conclusions Some of main ideas, presented in this paper, are included in Figure 2.
UNIVERSITY COOPERATION
Teachers
Students
ROLE
ROLE
Instructor
DIALOGUE
Learning to learn
Tools
Tools
New methodologies and technologies
Web 2.0
More active participation
Figure 2. Conclusions
7. References [1] Bauerova, D.: Are the roles of people in the process of education changing? In: E-Europe Proceedings of International Conference On Elearning In Education Under The Auspices Of Polish Leonardo Da Vinci Agency; 2006 March 06. Warszawa, 2006. p. 18-23. [2] Bauerova, D.: Improving knowledge and skills to use the ICT in education. In: VIRTUNIV, The VSB-Technical University, Ostrava. http://virtuniv.cz [2006/12/22] [3] Beerli, A. J, Falk S. & Diemers D.: Knowledge Management and Networked Environments: Leveraging Intellectual Capital in Virtual Business Communities. New York: AMACOM Books; 2003. [4] Bergeron P (2006). Ideas for Making Learning Interactive – Seven Myths About Learning. Lansing Community College. http://www.lcc.edu/cte/resources/teachingett es/sevenmyths.html [9/11/2006] [5] Bscw – Basic Support for Cooperative Work. http://bscw.fit.fraunhofer.de/ [9/11/2006] [6] Correas, J.M., Sein-Echaluce M.L., Correas I. & López P.: Extending educational webbased systems to meet new methodologies. Aceptado para su presentación en Education and Educational Technology (EDU'06).
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