2009 Ninth IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies
Open Educational Practices and Resources Based on Social Software: UTPL experience Nelson Piedra, Janneth Chicaiza
Edmundo Tovar, Oscar Martínez
Escuela de Ciencias de la Computación Universidad Técnica Particular de Loja Loja, Ecuador
[email protected],
[email protected]
Universidad Politécnica de Madrid Universidad Miguel Hernández Madrid, España
[email protected],
[email protected] if the license has been violated, then there are legal bases to defend the rights. Creative Commons with jurisdiction in Ecuador (creativecommons.ec) was launched on April 22 of 2008 with support of UTPL. Works produced by UTPL members keep Creative Commons License version 3.0, CC, with jurisdiction in Ecuador; The version 3.0, allows to any user; to copy, distribute and execute publicly the work and to make derivate works; always when work credits are renown in the way specified by the author.
Abstract—Open Educational Resources (OER) are a direct reaction to knowledge privatization; they foment their exchange to the entire world with the aim of increase the human intellectual capacity. In this document, we describe the committment of Universidad Técnica Particular de Loja (UTPL), Ecuador, in the promotion of open educational practices and resources and their impact in society and knowledge economy through the use of Social Software. Keywords-component; OER, Open Educational Resources, Web 2.0, Social Software, Education, Collaboration, University, Creative Commons Licences, UTPL.
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INTRODUCTION
Web 2.0 or Social Web is focused on the contents, relationships and knowledge but not specifically in technology [3]. It is an attitude, a paradigm change that is transforming the world of communications, knowledge, education, business and relationships. In UTPL moreover of the use de Virtual Campus (based on moodle, eva.utpl.edu.ec), motivates the use of social software (tools and services) in the classroom to engage all teachers and students in a new world of asynchronous and synchronous communications and interactive learning. From UTPL perspective, the most important aspect of social software is that it allows produce OER and improve learning processes. The adoption of those social web-tools may provoke changes in educational practices [4]. Many teachers and students in UTPL have adopted the use of social software as the first option of tools for learning.
The Web 2.0 philosophy has inspired different communities around the world, among them educational institutions as Universidad Técnica Particular de Loja (UTPL) which have taken the use of Social Software as an option for development of open educational initiatives; unfortunately, in Latin America there are just a few initiatives in context of Open Educational Resources (OER) development and their quality guarantee [1]. One of the greatest hurdles to sharing content online is the great diversity of content generated. Repositories tend to be database-specific, posing a challenge to data sharing. Large repositories often include thousands of individual records created by muldisciplinary teams, all in complex relationships that require too much time and expertise for the average users. A. OER production cycle The UTPL strategy to OER production is the promotion of an environment for collaboratively developing, freely sharing, and rapidly publishing scholarly content on the Web. To UTPL, anyone may view or contribute from anywhere in the world. The contents production cycle followed in UTPL is of co–authors that implies to create, share, re–use, improve and enriching contents collaboratively instead of the classic model of contents development: to create, connect, package and free which has a focus from one to many, where users are passive consumers.
Blogging and wikis Blogosphere and Wikipedia bear the world flag of collaborative open/free writing, with millions of articles and authors writing in many languages, about different topics and from the most diverse parts of the world. From an educational perspective, UTPL understands that blogging is autonomous, constructive and inherently conversational. Teachers or students can create a blog individually or in groups, they form their ideas about specific topics, gather, evaluate and interpret data and information, they assume positions, train in elaboration of arguments and evidence, and acquire abilities to express their thinking in the right way and style. The use of wikis is a good example of transition from static and restricted web to social and collaborative
B. UTPL Content license Creative Commons Licenses shows the will of the owners of the intellectual property and the creations to give some permission on the produced material [2]. In this sense, 978-0-7695-3711-5/09 $25.00 © 2009 IEEE DOI 10.1109/ICALT.2009.224
A CULTURAL SHIFT THROUGH THE ASSUMPTION OF SOCIAL SOFTWARE IN THE UTPL
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A summary of the use of social software for knowledge management, learning and OER development is shown in table 1. Collaborative Quality Control The traditional vision of contents quality assurance implies to do it by topics and with knowledge of experts instructional. International organizations are working on Quality Guarantee for OERs: UNESCO, OECD, and different international networks. In the context of UTPL, the quality is guaranteed collaboratively with students, teachers and experts participation during the learning and teaching process (even after it) through studying groups, practice communities and more over, being accessible through the web, it is under revision and improvement from people from all around the world.
participation (co-authors). The wikis enable to create, modify, and delete content in collaborative way. Mistakes are solved by social correction and with the support of content configuration management. TABLE I.
UTPL SOCIAL LEARNING TOOLS
Software social tool/service www.utpl.edu.ec/recursosvide oconferencias/ youtube.com/videoconferencia s (videos uploaded 800, april2009) youtube.com/utpl (videos uploaded 750, april2009) youtube.com/eccutpl (videos uploaded 30) Keynotes www.slideshare.net/utpl/ www.slideshare.net/group/ecc presentations uploaded: (uploaded 600 , april-2009) www.utpl.edu.ec/podcastutpl/
Community: www.utpl.edu.ec/blog/ Social bookmarking del.icio.us/tag/utpl del.icio.us/eccutpl Social networking based on Likedin.com
Description Videoconferencing online. Videos about class, tutorials, courses, conferences, seminaries, etc. Diverse audiovisual produced by UTPL
material
Videos of Computer Sciences School, UTPL Presentations develop in schools and centers of investigation, technology transference, extension and services of the university, classifieds in four thematic areas: socio-humanistic, biological, administrative, and technical area Podcast about courses (culture of peace, laws, ICT), congress, tutorials, news, interviews, etc. Blogs directory based on wordpress multiuser plataform. There are academic and research blogs; written by students, teachers, faculties, laboratories and others UTPL instances. Used as repository of bookmarks that can be accessed from any computer, anytime, anywhere. In UTPL social networking provides access to extended profiles of students, teachers, invited professors, partners, administrative personnel, technicians, ex – students, etc.
CONCLUSIONS Educative institutions must not put available just designs and educational materials through open access repositories, but they must open and share their experiences, processes, cases, learned lessons and give suggestions about how to improve educational practices. ACKNOWLEDGMENT This work has been done with the support of the Project AL09-PID-36 “Estrategias para el desarrollo e investigación en OER” UPM Relations with Latinoamérica Program. REFERENCES [1]
[2]
[3] [4]
It is important to consider the necessity of create formal and informal links between teachers, students and self taught people through learning environments, reconsider the aspirations and necessities of the students, promote creativity and collaboration in all the educational process [5,6]. In this sense, are acknowledge potential capacities between social software, weblogs and wikis [7], and the possibility of an impact in the reduction of the gap that exist between the actual educational practices and the expectations and necessities of a generation of students who use in a natural way the web 2.0 tools and services to communicate and form communities of interest out side the classrooms. To the question of: Is it possible for universities to take advantage from web 2.0? The answer must be yes.
[5] [6] [7]
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Romero, L. M. (2007, September). Quality and social pertinence: The role of the latin-american and caribbean institute for quality in distance higher education (CALED). CERI. (2007). Giving knowledge for free: The emergence of open educational resources (Center for Educational Research & Innovation, Eds.). OECD publishing. O’Reilly, T. (2005). What is web 2.0? Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software. O’Reilly Network. OLCOS. (2007). Open Educational Practices and Resources. olcos roadmap 2012 (A. Guntram Geser Salzburg Research / EduMedia Group, Ed.) (No. ISBN 3-902448-08-3). Open eLearning Content Observatory Services. Richardson, W. (2006a). Blogs, wikis, podcasts and other powerful web tools for classrooms. Corwin Press. Richardson, W. (2006b, October). The new face of learning (Tech. Rep. No. 164). Edutopia. Duffy, P., & Bruns, A. (2006). The use of blogs, wikis and rss in education: A conversation of possibilities [Conference Paper]. In In proceedings online learning and teaching conference 2006 (p. 31-38). Brisbane.
