Education in the Open Government Partnership commitments

The improvement of education is a recurring objective within the commitments of the countries that participate in the Open Government Partnership (OGP). There are several national commitments related to the opening of Data, Information and Education Materials as teaching and learning tools within the national plans for Open Governance. In this context, we examine how these elements are related to the OGP commitments of countries at the international level and to propose strategies for the implementation of concrete policies that support these commitments with respect to education and to citizenship education. To achieve this objective, we will present the results of an exhaustive study on the models of education and civic education of different national OGP commitments, and based on the results of this study, we will present a diagnosis regarding how really open and sustainable these are. The results of this study allow us to present a series of strategies to promote open education (understood as those practices based on content released under open licenses that allow universal and democratic access to quality educational materials) as a tool to promote educational development amongst OGP member countries. The strategies to be presented include the effective promotion of the use of open government data as learning and teaching tools, citizen education focused on promoting understanding of access to public information, promoting the creation and development of initiatives national and international programs that promote sustainable open education in public education systems, and finally, the proposal of open education policy development models that allow the commitments made by governments and ministries to have a practical application. As summary: our goal is to provide to the Open Education Community practical tools that allow supporting the different countries of the region in the adoption of open education by generating policies that encourage open educational practices

Open Data as driver of critical data literacies in Higher Education

Participation in today’s datafied society requires a series of transversal skills. In fact, we need technical abilities and media literacies weaved in a critical approach to understand the socio-political and cultural mechanisms that affects individuals and groups. Higher Education (HE) must lead in the development of critical, socio-technical pedagogic approaches to understand and analyse data. To this end, adopting Open Data as the base of Open Educational Practices has potential to trigger authentic learning. situations. In this regard, the approach aims at going beyond the development of technical abilities to extract, elaborate and integrate Open Data in services, activities and projects. In fact, using data as OER in research-based learning activities for data journalism and civic monitoring techniques can be the catalyser for the appropriation of the datafied public spaces and also, to data ownership and activism. On the basis of these pedagogical practices, HE could play a key role in fostering critical approaches. The abilities developed in HE should transcend the classroom, to understand datafication in society. In time, HE students and teachers would contribute to shaping informed and transformative democratic practices and dialogue empowering citizens to address social justice concerns. This envisioned strategy requires of faculty development and engagement, as data literacies need of disciplinary and pedagogical efforts to innovate in curricular and learning design. Furthermore, supporting faculty’s awareness and practices to shape critical and ethical approaches to data implies care for spaces of dialogue at the juncture of technical and social needs. Care for interdisciplinary thinking and understanding the differences between “Psyche and Tekné”, building on Umberto Galimberti’s conceptualisation of the problem of balance between ethics/social sciences and technological advancement. Session content This workshop explores the educational potential of Open Data as a driver of interdisciplinary dialogue in learning design and pedagogical practices. It will offer instruments for designing educational interventions in two simple phases: 1- A conceptual (but dialogical!) introduction, to present the principles, the policy context and existing practices in citizen science, responsible research and innovation and Open Data, and the connections with data literacy in HE will be defined from the perspective of the researchers and their experiences in using Open Data for educational/learning purposes. An initial overview of the principles and resources to work with Open Data as OER in the context of Data in Education will be introduced. Also the frameworks to develop data literacy in HE will also be considered with a focus on the issues hindering these practices will be also displayed. 2- A “hands on” exercise in which the concepts above will be applied to the participants’ pedagogical practices, and their sense discussed on the light of both practical and deontological implications. The educational potential of Open Data in the participants perspective will collect personal reflections to understand in which extent the concept of open data could be applied to personal pedagogical practices. Which datasets could be useful? Which are the critical issues that I could face to use open data in my pedagogical practices? The reflections will be collected by using sticky notes and a map of possible future practices. Session recording: https://youtu.be/BZJX2BifYI

The OE policy registry – An open benchlearning tool

The OER World Map platform facilitates access to materials and knowledge to promote OEP, acting as a source of information for everyone interested in Open Education. One of its newest developments is the OE Policy Registry, which aims not only to record the current policies in open education but to become the knowledge hub to support the wider OE community in developing OE policies, helping them to locate and bench-learn from existing policies and the people and organisations which have developed and promoted them. Much discussion of the need for open education policy has occurred at the supranational level. In some cases, nations and subnational governments have taken up the challenge of incorporating policy to enable open resources and practices into education policymaking agendas. What is less clear, and less straightforward to investigate, is the extent to which individual institutions are developing policies to support openness. This session reports on the current state of OE policies internationally, based on the OE Policy Registry dataset. Through engagement with the data held in the Policy Registry it has been possible to collect and examine a wide range of policy documents and sketch some key features of the OE policy landscape. Further auditing of this dataset is needed, in order that the registry can be used effectively to support policy benchlearning by OE advocates, researchers and policymakers. The session will cover the initial findings of a research project conducted using this dataset, and additionally, inputs gained during a series of workshops designed to support OE policy co-creation. We will present key features of the OE Policy Registry to support – OE advocates seeking to support and enhance practice through policy – Policymakers at institutional and governmental levels – Researchers interested in OE policy For these user groups, several different use-cases are addressed and presented: – Policymakers can showcase and find good practice policy exemplars, which they can adapt and reuse within their context. – OER advocates and advocacy networks can connect with each other, so that they can exchange experiences and cooperate in joint projects. – Researchers can collect data on policy activities in different educational sectors and geographical areas, gaining a deeper understanding of the functioning of OE ecosystems and develop strategies for mainstreaming. Recording available: https://youtu.be/ra34cClfd9

On the trail of OE policy co-creation

The workshop objectives are to give the participants with some basic policy co-design skills, and as well as an overview of the key techniques and elements needed to opening up the arenas to foster sustainable policies. To support these objectives the workshop is grounded on the participation and co-creation standard developed by OGP to foster the co-creation of national commitments, and uses a set of cards and a canvas (adapted from those developed by the UK Policy Lab) aligning the elements with those recommended by the Ljubljana Action Plan, and the JRC report, Policy Approaches to Open Education The workshop aim at raising awareness of the international landscape to widening participation to ensure that the policy co-creation process in a specific context, involving a wide range of partners to ensure the correct implementation, overseeing the opportunities and challenges of an OE policy, and the key elements these must comprise to foster global policy convergence [Haddad & Demsky (1995); Thompson & Cook (2014)]. By using a policy canvas and change cards, the participants consider issues such as who needs to be involved in the policy-making process, and who is needed to implement the policy considering the local context and the sociocultural issues at play, alongside with and other policies or regulatory models to draw upon. The first workshop was held at the OpenMed conference (Rome) with stakeholders from Egypt, Italy, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Palestine, Spain, and UK participated. The second workshop was held at the Open Education Policy Forum (Warsaw_ with participants from Germany, Malta, Poland, Romania, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, and The Netherlands The third workshop was held at OER19, with participants from Ireland, England, Scotland, Austria, The Netherlands, Australia and Spain discussed the potential of Open Education policies at international level

Opening teaching landscapes: The importance of quality assurance in the delivery of open educational resources

Scholars are increasingly being asked to share teaching materials, publish in open access journals, network in social media, and reuse open educational resources (OER). The theoretical benefits of Open Educational Practices (OEP) have become understood in the academic community but thus far, the use of OER has not been rapidly adopted. We aim to understand the challenges academics face with in attempting to adopt OEP, and identify whether these are related to or stem from the functionalities afforded by current repositories of OER (ROER). By understanding what academics and experts consider good practices, we can develop guidelines for quality in the development of ROER. In this article we present the findings from a study surveying academics using OER and experts who develop and/or work with ROER. We conclude by suggesting a framework to enhance the development and quality of ROER

Geographies of Access: Mapping the Online Attention to Digital Humanities Articles in Academic Journals

This poster aims to provide some answers in order to provide recommendations and best practices that might help democratise and increase the international access to peer-reviewed digital humanities research

Online Attention to Digital Humanities Publications (#DH2014 poster)

 This is the source dataset for Priego, Ernesto; Havemann, Leo; Atenas, Javiera (2014): Online Attention for Digital Humanities Publications (#DH2014 poster). figshare. http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1094345 This dataset is based on an original report obtained with the Altmetric Explorer on April 23 2014. More recent reports are likely to vary. The original Altmetric Explorer data export was refined, modified and edited by Ernesto Priego, Leo Havemann and Javiera Atenas. This version might not reflect the latest versions used by the authors, and further refining might be required. This poster was presented in the Digital Humanities 2014 conference, Lausanne, Switzerland, July the 10th 2014, 2:00pm - 3:30pm. If you use, share or refer to this data please use the citation information above. This dataset is shared under a CC-BY license.   &nbsp

Online attention to digital humanities publications

e suggest altmetrics services like the Altmetric Explorer can be an efficient method to obtain bibliographic datasets and track scholarly outputs being mentioned online in the sources curated by these services. Our dataset reflects that outputs with “digital humanities” in their metadata were not published in fully-fledged Open Access journals. The role of SSRN and arXiv as open repositories was found to be relatively significant, but the licensing of the outputs available through them was not always immediately clearly displayed. Our working definition of "Open Access" requires outputs to be open for human and machine access through CC-BY or at least CC-BY-SA. The absence of clear licensing information at output level is perceived to be problematic, as is the lack of any outputs clearly and visibly licensed with CC-BY. The fact the 3 most-mentioned outputs in the dataset were available without a paywall might signal towards the potential of Open Access for greater public impact. ‘Free access’ outputs in paywalled journals did not reflect higher mentions nor citations than their paywalled or non-paywalled counterparts. Though the dataset reflects a predictable dominance of authors based in the USA, the dataset points towards a growing presence of international digital humanities researchers

Relaunching the Open Education Policy Registry

Post on OER World Map Blog providing an update on the development of the OE Policy Registry

Retrieval of tropospheric water vapour from airborne far-infrared measurements: a case study

We describe studies undertaken in support of the Far-infrared Outgoing Radiation Understanding and Monitoring (FORUM) mission, ESA’s ninth Earth Explorer, designed to investigate whether airborne observations of far-infrared radiances can provide beneficial information on mid and upper tropospheric water vapour concentrations.Initially we perform a joint temperature and water vapour retrieval and show that the water vapour retrieval exploiting far-infrared measurements from the Tropospheric Airborne Fourier Transform Spectrometer (TAFTS) shows improvement over the a-priori Unified Model global forecast when compared to in situ dropsonde measurements. For this case the improvement is particularly noticeable in the mid-upper troposphere. Equivalent retrievals using mid-infrared radiances measured by the Airborne Research Interferometer Evaluation System (ARIES) show much reduced performance, with the degrees of freedom for signal (DFS), reduced by a factor of almost 2. Further sensitivity studies show that this advantage is decreased, but still present when the spectral resolution of the TAFTS measurements is reduced to match that of ARIES.The beneficial role of the far infrared for this case is further confirmed by performing water vapour only retrievals using ARIES and TAFTS individually, and then in combination. We find that the combined retrieval has a DFS value of 6.7 for water vapour, marginally larger than that obtained for the TAFTS retrieval and almost twice as large as that obtained for ARIES.These results provide observational support of theoretical studies highlighting the potential improvement that far-infrared observations could bring for the retrieval of tropospheric water vapour