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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.

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