While it is widely accepted that life experience which elderly people bring with them is very relevant in senior education, recent research indicates that this is also true for ICT and specifically to design effective learning technologies, methodologies and content for the elderly.
Taking this into account, the APADIS project has initially explored learning technologies to foster group activities instead of individual ones, and strengthen specific social relationships. Social Web 2.0 technologies can play a key role in that.
At the Ágora School of Adult People in La Verneda-St. Martí (Barcelona, Spain), which is based on participation, in fact we have built:
- A virtual gallery based on Yahoo! Flickr, an online photo sharing system, that allows the elderly students to store and browse previously downloaded pictures and to share them with their friends at the school, and with grandchildren and adult children at home, online.
- A blog based on WordPress which enables the elderly to work collaboratively with other students on the same or different projects online.
Both technologies enable old people to demonstrate their ability to use computers to their social circles (namely, their grandchildren who are a source of motivation and adult children, who can play a negative role) by using the Web, which we have found to be one of the most relevant indicators of digital literacy amongst the social networks of elderly people. These technologies also support online group-related educational activities, which are much closer to the elderly than those individually-centred activities fostered by traditional learning methodologies.
More information:
What is APADIS? APADIS is a project funded by the Spanish IMSERSO intended to design and develop an online virtual learning environment using open source technologies that meet the educational needs of elderly people in both online and traditional learning. APADIS builds upon ABE Campus, an online campus for Adult Basic Education, open source (http://www.basicampus.net/), currently being used in a broad array of courses at Âgora. The project is coordinated by CREA, http://www.pcb.ub.es/crea
The paper accepted for publication at the ACM Crossroads, Meeting some educational needs of elderly people in ICT: Two exploratory case studies. by Sergio Sayago, Patricia Santos, Maite Gonzalez, Miriam Arenas, and Laura Lopez, provides more detailed information and analysis. Contact Sergio Sayago at his e-mail address at upf dot es.
Sergio Sayago, Josep Blat and Toni Navarrete. Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona, Spain)
November 2nd, 2007
Open Content in education relates to the ability of (re-)using the content produced by somebody else in a different educational context. Although it is very good that one is allowed to use or modify the content according to a legal framework respecting the author’s rights, an important practical question arises: will that be possible when using different systems, or different computers? A positive answer to this question should be provided by interoperability; its goal is to enable that content works across different applications, operating systems, computers, …
The World Wide Web is probably the best example of interoperability achievement: the web documents use html as language and a http protocol, which have been widely adopted. Thus, in general, web documents can be seen with different computers, operating systems, browsers, … In this sense, this is an excellent basis for Open Content.
However, the functions needed in education go beyond “seeing” documents. For instance, most e-learning in practice is based on Learning Management Systems (such as WebCT, Blackboard, Moodle, …) which have functions that enable student tracking, content organisation, assessment, administration … These Learning Management Systems are largely not interoperable, since functionalities such as those we have just mentioned do not transfer easily from one system to the other. For the author it means that s/he is locked to one system, and changes of system are expensive in human resources.
How to enable interoperability? Through agreeing interoperability specifications, which all the applications, systems should follow to allow for it. When these specifications have been agreed by certain international bodies, they are called standards. Currently there are several organisations which have proposed specifications in the e-learning area. IMS is the most important and acknowledged among them. The most significant IMS specification from an interoperability perspective is IMS Learning Design (IMS LD, for short). According to this specification, besides the mere content, a learning design has to be provided, a sort of a real lesson plan; the perspective is that people in roles, such as student, teacher, tutor, …, develop activities (with a certain educational flow) within an environment which includes resources, tools, … Using this type of description, the goal is that educational descriptions can be really re-used, they can be moved across different Learning Management Systems – and actual implementation can also be exchanged.
The adoption of a specification depends to a large extent on the availability of good, well-documented, open source implementations. Due to the complexity and recentness of IMS LD, just a few compliant tools have been implemented. The most significant are the Reload editor, the CopperCore engine, and the Sled player. Several European R+D projects focus on different aspects of the standard and are also producing new tools. However, the limited set of available tools is making authors to use other open source tools, being Moodle the main option. Moodle provides an easy-to-understand interface, as well as an easy and well-documented API that enables developers to adapt the tool. A huge community of Moodle authors, users and developers already exists, where a big number of learning resources is accessible. In fact many universities are moving its learning management systems from commercial solutions to Moodle.
Whether Moodle will become a sort of standard de facto is not clear, although not unlikely. Nevertheless, there are efforts in the Moodle community to support IMS LD units of learning, which would be an important achievement from an interoperability point of view. Meanwhile, new tools have to be developed for IMS LD, where a key factor that has to be considered is the new social approach of using the web (Web 2.0), and its implications in the learning process.
Josep Blat and Toni Navarrete. Universitat Pompeu Fabra.
May 9th, 2007
