Ale Okada

Alexandra Okada
- Aug 12, 2013
- 2 min read

Keynote at Challenges 2013 International Conference on ICT in Education

Learning anytime anywhere was the key theme of the VIII International Conference on ICT in Education – Challenges 2013, which was held in July 2013 in Portugal.

Organised by the ICT in Education Competence Centre of the University of Minho Institute of Education, the conference covered a plural range issues, structured in three main topics:

Emerging environments
Digital and curriculum
Digital evaluation

The topic “Emerging environments” included the more recent technological innovations, searching for lines of future development in the dimensions related to education and training.

Ale Okada, invited as a keynote, presented the project WESPOT “Working Environment with social personal and open technologies for inquiry based learning”, whose features , strongly anchored in digital and networked technology, highlighted very well the key theme of this conference. More than 400 attendees from higher and basic education came to engage in a programme. All keynotes were also live-streamed increasing therefore the open access to the conference. Okada, however, mentioned that increasing access to conference talks through live webcast was not new for Challenges. Seven years ago, during the initial editions of Challenges, Okada presented Open Learning Technologies of the OpenLearn Project through webinar using FM which was widely accessed. “Challenges” was the first international event which allowed online presentation of a conference paper . This significant and innovative opportunity opened up several other online talks in various events that doubled or tripled the number of viewers, by extending our reach geographically as well as temporally through the video web conferencing application FM. During Challenges 2013, Okada also launched her book “Open Educational Resources and Social Networks” edited by the OU KMI, published by UEMA University in Brazil . The free print copies were distributed in the conference and received by the Chancellor (Rector) of the Open University in Portugal and the Educational Projects Director of the Education and Science Ministry as well as the Diretor of EUN (European Schoolnet).

Alexandra Okada
- Oct 17, 2012
- 1 min read

The weSPOT project - kickoff meeting today!

Alexandra Okada, Wednesday 17 October 2012

The kickoff meeting of the weSPOT project took place in Heerlen, Netherlands. Funded by the European Commission, 9 partner institutions will collaborate throughout the next 3 years to provide a Working Environment with Social, Personal and Open Technologies for Inquiry Based Learning across European higher academic institutions and schools.

The weSPOT environment will support users (from 12 to 25) to develop their inquiry based learning skills by means of smart support tools for orchestrating inquiry workflows including mobile apps, learning analytics and social collaboration.

KMi - represented by Ale Okada, Alex Mikroyannidis and Peter Scott - will be responsible for Personal and Social Inquiry Workflows as well as two pilots related to Biodiversity and Food.

weSPOT is tackling the key issue of innovating inquiry based learning by integrating social, personal and open technologies for connecting informal and formal learning experiences. During the project, a reference model for inquiry skills as well as a diagnostic instrument will be developed to measure the individual performance on the defined inquiry skills.

Innovating learning through Education 3.0

Alexandra Okada, Wednesday 03 October 2012

Innovating learning through Education 3.0 was the key theme of the first conference InovaEduca 3.0, which was held in Sao Paulo Brazil, 1st of October. This event provided a forum for researchers and practitioners to meet and discuss the wide-ranging of principles and practices on the uses of technology for improving competences and skills in the Digital Age of Open Knowledge.

The term Education 3.0 has recently emerged to highlight the importance of preparing all students for this digital age. Keats & Schmidt (2007) describes Education 1.0 as one-way process. Education 2.0 focuses on interactive online learning. Education 3.0 is characterized by “rich, cross-institutional, cross-cultural educational opportunities within which the learners themselves play a key role as creators of knowledge”. Advances in technology have been changing the ways we communicate with other people, how we acquire and assimilate information as well as how we create knowledge. Users, both organizations and individuals, can now create their own networks, construct content together and enable formal or informal learning collaboratively (Okada, Connolly and Scott, 2012). According to Jim Legel (2012) the Education 3.0 School should encourage students to:

Work collaboratively on problems worth solving
engage in self-directed research
learn how to tell a good story
employ tools appropriate to the task
learn to be curious and creative

These issues were discussed on InovaEduca 3.0. More than 500 attendees from higher and basic education came to engage in a programme which contained keynotes from Brazil, USA and UK: Adriana Martinelli (Ayrton Senna Institute); ; Angel Marchelli (Microsoft); Jim Lengel (New York University); Gil Giardelli, (Miami Ad School); Luciano Meira (UFPE, Brazil) ; Vani Kenski, Gil Marques (USP - Brasil) and Ale Okada (Open University – UK) Okada had a special participation through live web conference. Her talk focussed on COLearning – Collaborative Open Learning where teachers and students are colearners –partners on the process of sensemaking, understanding and creating knowledge together. She introduced two books launched in KMi and UNESCO this year:

"Collaborative Learning 2.0: Open Educational Resources" (by IGI Publishers) was written by 58 authors, who are leading researchers and practitioners in their field, from 14 countries: Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Germany, Greece, India, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, The Netherlands, UK and USA. “Open Educational Resources and Social Networks” (by Scholio Publishers) written by 35 research groups from South and North America and Europe. This e-book was developed during the OpenScout Project based on “the OER Flow” developed by Scott Leslie and Okada She also described two examples of co-inquiry based learning projects for Innovating learning through Education 3.0

The project WESPOT “Working Environment with social personal and open technologies for inquiry based learning”, funded by the European commission, is starting now (2012 – 1015). Its aim is to provide technologies for students performing their scientific investigations collaboratively. Students will also be able to share their inquiry accomplishments in social networks and receive feedback from the learning environment and their peers.

The project developed in 2008 "Flying across Brazil, Portugal and France" by schools from these three countries won the competition "Innovative Educators", sponsored by Microsoft. Students´ co-investigation focused on the "14-Bis" airplane built by Brazilian pioneer Alberto Santos-Dumont and flown in France in 1906 - setting the first aviation record in Europe. Students in the project used blogs and FM to share information between countries about the 14-bis airplane and Santos-Dumont's life.