How might learning technology impact on the modern delivery of learning in Scotland?

This document has been prepared following a meeting on 23 June 2010 between Michael Russell, Scottish Cabinet Secretary for Education and Lifelong Learning, and the Association for Learning Technology (ALT), represented by Seb Schmoller, Chief Executive and Dr Linda Creanor, ALT Trustee. The purpose of the document is to highlight areas which are of particular relevance to education in Scotland and to respond to specific questions raised at the meeting in Edinburgh. It has been written by members of the ALT-Scotland group, consisting of institutional ALT representatives from Scottish colleges and universities as well as Scottish-based ALT committee members whose backgrounds encompass all sectors of Scottish education

Using Social Network Analysis to Explore Digital Student Interactions and Business Competency Learning in a Web-based Educational Platform:

Web 2.0 tools occupy a large part of our lives, and their use in the classroom offers instructors a unique opportunity to gather substantial information about individual and interactive student behaviors. The authors’ challenge is understanding the implications of this rich data source for assessing course efficacy and student learning, and applying these insights to further enhance the development of global business competencies. This paper reviews 311 student interactions as reflected in comments exchanged in a digital social learning community and, using social network analysis, discusses the potential to use these interactions to assess student critical thinking, communication, and collaborative feedback skills. The authors conclude with implications and recommendations for instructors who want to use Web 2.0 platforms and data to enhance their understanding of student and class digital interactions, and apply this information to course enhancement

Analysing interactions in a teacher network forum: a sociometric approach

This article presents the sociometric analysis of the interactions in a forum of a social network created for the professional development of Portuguese-speaking teachers. The main goal of the forum, which was titled Stricto Sensu, was to discuss the educational value of programmes that joined the distance learning model in Brazil. The empirical study focused on the sociometrie analysis of the social interactions that take place in asynchronous online environments. This approach, according to literature, allows for new means to observe, analyse, and interpret the reality of a new social paradigm. This type of analysis tries to understand the relationship established between the different actors, seeking to verify if the roles they play in both the access to information and the construction of shared knowledge. The data collected allow the researchers to deduce that the indicators used in the analysis are important for understanding and intervening in the dynamics and functioning of the network to propose improvements in its structure and organisation. In the specific case of the aforementioned discussion forum, the results of the sociometrie analysis of the perceived interactions were not surprising, considering that the nature of the topic did not demand deep reflection to contribute to the debate.This work is funded by Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology under the doctoral grant SFRH/BD/60677/2009

Geographic Mobility in the European Union: Optimising its Economic and Social Benefits

One of the founding principles of the European Union is the freedom of movement of workers (Article 39 of the Treaty establishing the European Community). The free movement of workers is essential for the creation of an area without internal frontiers, and for the strength-ening of economic and social cohesion and active citizenship.Taking an economic perspective, geographic mobility can have major positive effects by bringing about economic growth in countries with labour deficits and prosperity in countries with labour surplus. Hence, the diffusion of skills through occupational and geographic mo-bility is a central factor to enhance the productive capacity of firms and put regions or na-tional economies on a higher growth path. Taking a social perspective, geographical mobility has the potential of fostering social-cultural integration in the European Union, and strength-ening European identity and inter-cultural networks

The realities of ‘reaching out’: enacting the public-facing open scholar role with existing online communities

A core tenet of the open educational resources (OER) movement has long been that 'the world's knowledge is a public good' (Smith & Casserly, 2006, p.2) and should be available for everyone to use, reuse and share. However, this vision of openness and of the connection between OER and social justice, which McAndrew and Farrow (2013) observe is currently re-emerging, is limited by the fact that OER-provision is typically top-down, driven by higher education suppliers with the needs of higher education (HE) in mind. As a consequence, the OER that are released can be hard to find for potential users outside HE and often fail to meet those potential users' needs in respect of the content, size, format and level of the OER. Seeking to increase the impact of OER and open educational practices (OEP) beyond higher education we conceptualised a new role for academics - the public-facing open scholar. The role involves academics working with online communities outside HE to source OER to meet the specific needs of those communities. Having developed detailed guidelines for performing the role we piloted it within a voluntary sector child welfare community in order to explore its viability. To date, our pilot findings indicate that the role of public-facing open scholar is both viable and well-received by the case study community. However, the pilot process, conducted in a community which requires all participants to be anonymous, has also highlighted the need to be aware of the impact of privacy constraints when choosing a community with which to work. In addition, the pilot indicated that listening to a community's needs involves more than noting requests for advice and includes attentiveness to a community's culture and typical modes of participation. This, in turn, can help the public-facing open scholar to fit in with the community and gain members' trust. The implications of these findings are wide-ranging. Voluntary sector online communities offer one platform for the public-facing open scholar to realise the transformative potential of open education, raising awareness and increasing the use and reuse of OER by people outside HE. However, the scope for the role is not limited to the voluntary sector and academics could find opportunities to perform the role in many different types of community. Furthermore, whilst we have concentrated on the role of the individual academic, institutional dimensions are also relevant. For example, higher education institutions which formally recognise the public-facing open scholar role as an important component of academic output, rather than an activity which is in tension with the demands of paid employment, may themselves be seen as taking on the role of a benevolent academy that is contributing to a global movement for free and open access to knowledge

Envisioning Digital Europe 2030: Scenarios for ICT in Future Governance and Policy Modelling

The report Envisioning Digital Europe 2030 is the result of research conducted by the Information Society Unit of IPTS as part of the CROSSROAD Project - A Participative Roadmap on ICT research on Electronic Governance and Policy Modelling (www.crossroad-eu.net ). After outlining the purpose and scope of the report and the methodological approach followed, the report presents the results of a systematic analysis of societal, policy and research trends in the governance and policy modelling domain in Europe. These analyses are considered central for understanding and roadmapping future research on ICT for governance and policy modelling. The study further illustrates the scenario design framework, analysing current and future challenges in ICT for governance and policy modelling, and identifying the key impact dimensions to be considered. It then presents the scenarios developed at the horizon 2030, including the illustrative storyboards representative of each scenario and the prospective opportunities and risks identified for each of them. The scenarios developed are internally consistent views of what the European governance and policy making system could have become by 2030 and of what the resulting implications for citizens, business and public services would be. Finally, the report draws conclusions and presents the proposed shared vision for Digital Europe 2030, offering also a summary of the main elements to be considered as an input for the future development of the research roadmap on ICT for governance and policy modelling.JRC.DDG.J.4-Information Societ

Industrial Plant Layout Analyzing Based on SNA

Social network analysis (SNA) is a widely studied research topics, which has been increasingly being applied for solving different kind of problems, including industrial manufacturing ones. This paper focuses on the application of SNA on an industrial plant layout problem. The study aims at analyzing the importance of using SNA techniques to analyze important relations between entities in a manufacturing environment, such as jobs and resources in the context of industrial plant layout analysis. The study carried out enabled to obtain relevant results for the identification of relations among these entities for supporting to establish an appropriate plant layout for producing the jobs.This work has been supported by COMPETE: POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007043 and FCT - The Foundation for Science and Technology within the Project Scope: UID/CEC/00319/2013.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Integrating organizational, social, and individual perspectives in Web 2.0-based workplace e-learning

From the issue entitled 'Special Issue: Emerging Social and Legal Aspect'E-learning is emerging as a popular approach of education in the workplace by virtue of its flexibility to access, just-in-time delivery, and cost-effectiveness. To improve social interaction and knowledge sharing in e-learning, Web 2.0 is increasingly utilized and integrated with e-learning applications. However, existing social learning systems fail to align learning with organizational goals and individual needs in a systemic way. The dominance of technology-oriented approaches makes elearning applications less goal-effective and poor in quality and design. To solve the problem, we address the requirement of integrating organizational, social, and individual perspectives in the development of Web 2.0 elearning systems. To fulfill the requirement, a key performance indicator (KPI)-oriented approach is presented in this study. By integrating a KPI model with Web 2.0 technologies, our approach is able to: 1) set up organizational goals and link the goals with expertise required for individuals; 2) build a knowledge network by linking learning resources to a set of competences to be developed and a group of people who learn and contribute to the knowledge network through knowledge creation, sharing, and peer evaluation; and 3) improve social networking and knowledge sharing by identifying each individual's work context, expertise, learning need, performance, and contribution. The mechanism of the approach is explored and elaborated with conceptual frameworks and implementation technologies. A prototype system for Web 2.0 e-learning has been developed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach. © Springer Science + Business Media, LLC 2009.postprin

Report No. 19: Geographic Mobility in the European Union: Optimising its Economic and Social Benefits

Joint expertise with NIRAS Consultants and AMS for the European Commission, Bonn 2008 (159 pages)

The Digital Economy: Social Interaction Technologies – an Overview

Social interaction technologies (SIT) is a very broad field that encompasses a large list of topics: interactive and networked computing, mobile social services and the Social Web, social software and social media, marketing and advertising, various aspects and uses of blogs and podcasting, corporate value and web-based collaboration, e-government and online democracy, virtual volunteering, different aspects and uses of folksonomies, tagging and the social semantic cloud of tags, blog-based knowledge management systems, systems of online learning, with their ePortfolios, blogs and wikis in education and journalism, legal issues and social interaction technology, dataveillance and online fraud, neogeography, social software usability, social software in libraries and nonprofit organizations, and broadband visual communication technology for enhancing social interaction. The fact is that the daily activities of many businesses are being socialized, as is the case with Yammer (https://www.yammer.com/), the social enterprise social network. The leitmotivs of social software are: create, connect, contribute, and collaborate