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September 2006 Volume 2, Number 3 |
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IN
THIS ISSUE INTERAGIR: A NEW E-LEARNING PLATFORM FROM THE BOARD
I CENTRAL AMERICA |
INTERAGIR: A NEW E-LEARNING PLATFORM – NOW A CREAD BENEFIT Professor Luiz Valter Brand Gomes Professor Luiz Valter Brand Gomes, President and Director of the Euclides da Cunha Foundation of the Universidad Federal Fluminense, and CREAD Vice President for Brazil, recently made an announcement that will be of great interest to CREAD members. He has placed an “open source” platform named Interagir that was developed by his team at the disposal of all CREAD institutional members. In addition to Professor Gomes, the team consists of: Professor Rosângela Lopes Lima of the Computer Institute of the Universidad Federal Fluminense; Filipe Ancelmo Saramago and Jairo Lino, systems analysts, of the Euclides da Cunha Foundation, and Diego Dacal, web designer, also of the Euclides da Cunha Foundation. The design of this platform for educational projects was originally part of the academic activities of a graduate course in Computer Science at the Universidad Federal Fluminense in Niter ó i, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Wishing to experience a new technology at first hand, professors and students proposed that an e-learning platform should be created for distance education. It became part of the final course project in February 2000, and the first version of this environment may be seen in Figure 1.
The next step was to build a team that would be responsible for maintaining and updating the platform, so as to create an environment that would be appropriate for professors and students wanting to use information and communication technologies for distance teaching and learning activities. Gradually these were joined by other faculty members and students, and the group became an important generator of knowledge and new possibilities of technological applications for academic activities. The success of this project, which is rapidly becoming self-sustaining, reinforces the idea that, in learning and helping others to learn, the urge to pursue knowledge and the desire to do something genuinely useful for the academic community and for society are fundamental. The persistence and motivation of our team, that continues unabated, has given added value to the interactive environment, now named the Interagir Platform in its most recent version. The home page can be seen in Figure 2, and it can be found at www.interagir.uff.br.
Today Interagir is a technological environment that encompasses virtual learning environments including the ability to carry out joint projects. An early version of the e-learning platform – UFF@Distância – was initially constructed in ASP and Oracle, with Page-Centric and proprietary software. New versions have been produced and new capabilities have been added to the platform, which has been made available to UFF faculty members, and this has led to significant improvements in relations with users, and considerably increased use, by both faculty and students. The application has been reconstructed and developed with an Open Source philosophy and open and free templates (Java and the PostgreSQL database) and this has led to a significant improvement in the level of quality and reliability of the system, making it possible to adapt the interfaces to the needs of public and private institutional clients, who thus become external associates of the university, consolidating university-company and university-public institution lliances. In addition to the option of using and customizing the Interagir Platform for different alliances, we developed the concept of collaborative environments that offer communication, registration and data storage services to support the collaborative work. In Figure 3 the collaborative environment of the Research Group is shown, and this was developed to support the projects and the research of the Interagir Group: Technology Mediated Education, of the Universidad Federal Fluminense.
The Interagir Team’s most recent project has to do with CREAD. The customization of the Interagir Platform to offer free access to institutional members of CREAD is currently in progress, and we are convinced that it will offer many possibilities for the development of research projects and exchanges of experiences between the institutions that belong to the Consortium. Figure 4 shows the interface for the environment that we are developing to facilitate relationships between the institutions that make up our membership.
In the very near future, the CREAD Interagir Project plans to offer our members collaborative tools adapted to their needs in Portuguese, Spanish and English. Report on the TENTH CREAD MERCOSUR/SUL CONGRESS, held in Antofagasta, Chile This international meeting brought together more than 175 specialists in Distance Education, including directors, instructors and researchers from 11 Latin American countries, with the presentation of approximately 45 papers on the central themes established by the conference objectives; a multidisciplinary approach was taken to topics such as the use of instructional and communication technologies for education and training in the health and education areas; experiences were analyzed around the theme of Quality Administration and Accreditation in Higher Distance Education; in addition links between CREAD member institutions and between Latin American distance education professionals were created or einforced, generating important and innovative research and development projects, new support networks, strategic alliances and exchanges and tele-learning. From the organizational point of view, the objectives of giving a quality service to the visitors were fully met, with unforgettable Latin American social and cultural activities. in addition we provided a demonstration of the new information and communication technologies (Wi-Fi and Internet) to participants and presenters via videoconference connections between Florida, USA, the Dominican republic, Brazil, Argentina and Chile and, finally, the quality of the presentations and keynotes was extremely high.
I CREAD México CREAD will be offering a conference in Mexico, I CREAD Mexico, “Competitive Capacity in the Small Business”, co-organized by the Corporate University of the Autonomous University of Guadalajara ( UAG) and Nova Southeastern University (NSU). Taking the global market as a starting point, the co-organizers decided to direct their efforts to disseminating and promoting their knowledge and experience to assist in the improvement of the commercial and labor culture in the small business environment. The Mexican government understands and recognizes that small businesses are a large-scale creator of jobs, a provider for large businesses and the mainstay of the socio-economic development of the nation. This is a huge long-term challenge, and the future is already here. The central topics that have been selected have major potential to grow and bear fruit:
Come and join us at this great event; it is for YOU. We will attend to every detail for your maximum satisfaction and benefit. See you in Guadalajara! For further information please go to the conference website : http://creadmexico.uag.mx In its August 2006 editorial, on information technologies and knowledge networks, the Educational Portal of the Americas ( www.educoas.org ) said that collaboration is the response to three basic questions: “What can I contribute to others?”, “What do I need from others?”, “What do we all need that we should work on together?”. Certainly, in answering questions like these we come to a strategy where we all become providers and beneficiaries, based on having the humility to recognize that however many strengths and riches we have, we still need something from others, and at the same time we reevaluate what we are and what we have, and however little it may seem to us, we always have something to contribute: all of which is done in an atmosphere of collaboration, in the conviction that together we will do more and we will do it better. I could give many examples of the advantages of collaborative work, in our case, at the Virtual University System of the University of Guadalajara we have always had institutions, organizations and individuals from many fields working with us in all our activities. In particular I would like to mention that I am proud of having been a founder member of CREAD at the Constituent Assembly that took place at Penn State in October 1993 and this has always been of great support in relationships with educational institutions throughout the Americas. Some of the forms of collaborative work that have been tried and that we recommend are: research networks, sharing databases, building and sharing repositories of learning objects, networks for human resource training, agreements on quality criteria, sharing learning platforms, joint publications, exchanges of educational materials, and as many activities as there are needs that we can help to resolve. In this spirit of collaboration we send greetings to CREAD members and readers of this newsletter and invite them to work with us so that together we may continue to promote distance education as a strategy for a better quality of life and cooperation. MANUEL MORENO CASTAÑEDA Catching the Third ICT Wave [Reprinted from Queen's Education Letter, Issue #2: Integrating ICT in Teaching and Learning, with permission from the authors.] Information and communication technology (ICT) has not trickled gradually into the schools but has come in waves. The general character of these waves is obvious to most observers, but interpretations differ. The following is our interpretation: Wave 1: Technology as an imperative. The reigning belief was that schools must become computerized and networked in order to prepare students for the Information Age (also in order to satisfy parental demands and to avoid seeming out-of-date). Governments drew up ambitious technology plans; vast sums were spent on hardware for the schools; ubiquitous training programs aimed to overcome teachers’ anxieties and resistances. Larry Cuban’s Oversold and Underused (2001) aptly described Wave 1 as it crested in the wealthy nations, while just starting to roll up the beaches in many poorer ones. Wave 2: “It isn’t the computers; it’s how you use them.” The imperative is not just to adopt ICT but to use it in educationally appropriate ways. The method of choice, promoted through books, workshops, and web sites, is “projects”—preferably, projects that make conspicuous use of multimedia and Worldwide Web resources. In Wave 2, the curriculum regains importance, but ICT is like the unexpected important guest at a dinner party, for whom a place must be found. Wave 3: ICT as affordances. Educational ideas are primary; secondarily, various ICT affordances may serve in realizing a particular idea. We use the term “affordances” here in Norman’s (1999) sense of perceived action possibilities. Experienced Wave 3 educators never ask, “How can I integrate ICT into this activity?” Instead, they think about how the cognitive and social dynamics of their classroom could be improved, how the class could evolve into a more successful knowledge building community. They are sufficiently aware of the affordances and limitations of the ICT at their disposal that it figures naturally into their planning and problem solving. They will be on the look-out for technology whose affordances are more closely aligned with their educational aspirations. Wave 1 was almost entirely an initiative of bureaucrats, administrators, and vendors. Its effect at the classroom level was epitomized by the teacher who said she kept her computer running because it provided just the right temperature for her pot of African violets. Wave 2, however, which is only beginning to abate, has been focused directly on classroom activity, and teachers have been under considerable pressure, both official and informal, to “integrate ICT into the curriculum.” Where resources permit, computers have been moved from computer laboratories into the classrooms, thus making integration into the curriculum a more realistic possibility, while discouraging the sort of “computers for the sake of computers” activities designed for scheduled visits to a computer lab. Wave 3, it would appear, has reached few classrooms beyond those actively involved with learning scientists. For latter-day practitioners of the “activity method” Wave 2 is the limit. For them a positive response to ICT consists of replacing some traditional learning activities with different ones or enriching traditional activities through the resources of ICT. A common Wave 2 phenomenon is updating the traditional school “project” by incorporating ICT. Here we are not referring to “project-based science” (Marx, Blumenfeld, Krajcik, & Soloway, 1997), where there is serious, question-driven knowledge development. Rather, we refer to what has typically been treated as a language arts activity, in which students, working individually or in small groups, identify topics, gather relevant information, organize it, and present it—traditionally in the form of a hand-written report illustrated with magazine clippings. Updating the traditional project may include retrieving information from the Web or from reference sources available on CD ROM, downloading graphics from similar sources or incorporating digital photos, and composing the report using a word processor or presentation software (Moss, 2000). Instead of using ICT to produce objects for display of information, students in Wave 3 classrooms use ICT to create knowledge (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 2003). They produce theories, models, proofs, problem formulations, interpretations, histories, critiques, and the like. These function for them as conceptual tools that they use in making sense of the world. As Bransford and Schwartz (1999) have suggested, the main value of school learning is the facilitation of further learning. Wave 3, we believe, is about this dynamic. ICT is relevant because of the roles it can play in supporting a process of sustained knowledge advancement. Most educators are philosophically favourable to Wave 3. It is associated with a number of generally “good words”: inquiry, constructivism, collaboration, curiosity, higher-level thinking skills, and so on. Why, then, is it so slow in making its way into practice? In our experience, the three most commonly encountered barriers are these: first, the test-driven curriculum, which tends to drive all those “good words” to the sidelines; second, a tendency of adults to be so impressed with young people’s ICT skills that they enshrine projects that enable students to show off those skills; third (and most deeply engrained) a lack of belief that children really can function as active members of a worldwide knowledge-creating culture. Proving that they can do so has been the major educational mission of our Institute for Knowledge Innovation and Technology (www.ikit.org). References Bransford, J., & Schwartz, D. (1999). Rethinking transfer: A simple proposal with multiple implications. Review of Research in Education, 25. Cuban, L. (2001). Oversold and underused: Computers in the classroom. Cambridge , MA: Harvard University Press. Marx, R. W., Blumenfeld, P. C., Krajcik, J. S., & Soloway, E. (1997). Enacting project-based science. Elementary School Journal, 97, 341-358. Moss, D. M. (2000). Bringing together technology and students: Examining the use of technology in a project-based class. Journal of Educational Computing Research, 22(2), 155-169. Norman, D. A. (1999). Affordances, conventions and design. Interactions 6(3):38-43. Scardamalia, M., & Bereiter, C. (2003). Knowledge building. In Encyclopedia of education (2nd Ed.) (pp. 1370-1373). New York: Macmillan Reference. PROFILES OF INSTITUTIONAL MEMBERS OF CREAD LOMAS DE ZAMORA NATIONAL UNIVERSITY (UNLZ) On October 13 th, 1972, the creation of the Lomas de Zamora University was authorized by National Law #19,888 under the National Ministry of Education’s New Universities Program. Under this program 15 national universities were established between 1971 and 1980, including the UNLZ. Currently the UNLZ has an average of 9,000 new students per year, with about 38,000 regular students; thus it educates a significant percentage of the higher education students in the Province of Buenos Aires. In addition, throughout its history the University has followed a solid academic course based on developing degree courses and on maintaining close ties to the community, especially the local community, so that it exerts a strong influence on the roughly 2,800,000 inhabitants of the southern Buenos Aires conurbation and surrounding areas. Over time the UNLZ has preserved its original mandate, which was founded on two basic axes which still constitute the nucleus of its identity:
Within this context, the UNLZ is a member of the Inter-American Distance Education Consortium because of its interest in expanding educational opportunities through distance education - by overcoming cultural differences and identities, increasing cooperation, and promoting joint activities. This is the challenge faced by UNLZ today and it is an essential component of its projects for the future.
His Holiness Pope John Paul II conferred the title Pontifical on the occasion of the Silver Jubilee of the institution on September 9 th, 1987. The University is committed to the scientific search for solutions to the challenges facing the Dominican people; to being a forum for the free discussion of ideas, and to the training of the leaders, technicians, professionals and experts that the nation needs for its material and spiritual development. By statute, the University is a private, non-profit institution, dedicated to teaching, research and service to the community. In its teaching and research programs it aims for academic excellence and the harmonious synthesis of reason, science, culture and a life in the Christian faith. The University has trained 47,764 professionals to date; also conferred 93,165 certificates in various technical, scientific and artistic fields. The PUCMM offers a chance to all Dominicans with the capacity and the desire to study by means of a broad program of educational credit - the first university in the country to offer this opportunity.
LA SALLE UNIVERSITY,(ULSA) La Salle University has educational institutions in 82 countries, including 70 educational centers and 14 universities in Mexico. The year 2005 marked 100 years of Lasallian presence in Mexico, with 100,000 students in its classrooms. In particular, La Salle University in Mexico City, which was established 43 years ago, has a broad, multilevel, educational program with 22 degrees and one coeducational preparatory program, and with these degree programs La Salle is recognized as being among the top five higher education institutions in the country. The educational model of La Salle University is centered on the integrated formation of the student as a person. This integrated formation pays careful attention to the development of each and every one of the human dimensions: intellectual, vocational, cultural-humanistic, spiritual, physical and social, viewing the student as a unified whole. Thanks to the Lasallian impetus in the field of distance education, as well as the advances in telecommunications, the Lasallian Videoconference Network has been developed. Here there are innovative interactive areas that shorten distances and foster brotherhood in the service of educational communities in Mexico and the rest of the world. The Lasallian Network is a data network dedicated to the exchange of video and audio in real time; its infrastructure is based on a Virtual Private Network (VPN) which can link 24 different Lasallian sites across the country. We create videoconferences based on the H.323 protocol standards and transmit them at 320 kbps via the operations center located at ULSA Mexico. Multipoint videoconferences are held with 16 sites simultaneously. At the central site we have ISDN and Internet 2 to provide the VPN sites with videoconferencing services both for inland and overseas. The Lassalian Videoconference Network now has 24 sites in the Republic of Mexico, which has made it possible for the academic programs of the Distance Education Center to be moved to the new schedules and learning environments favored by the use of tools such as the Educational Service Portal ( www.temachtiani.com ) which is used to publish and administer them; it also has the human talent and technology required for the production of quality audiovisual media to enrich the course materials. This technology enables us to offer professional development opportunities to the teaching community in many parts of the country as well as fostering the development of children, youth and adults, putting our beliefs into practice through every program and activity that takes place. For Lasallist institutions, the integrated development of the human being is primary, and most important, together with supporting the community, and that is why they are always at the forefront – on behalf of Education. INDIVISA MANENT FIRST CREAD CENTRAL AMERICA This conference is being organized by the State Distance University (UNED) and will be held November 1-3, 2006 in San José, Costa Rica.
FIFTEENTH INTERNATIONAL DISTANCE EDUCATION CONFERENCE The Virtual University of the University of Guadalajara is the organizer of the Fifteenth International Distance Education Conference, with participation by academic keynoters from inland and overseas, and with representatives of the Autonomous Community of Andalucia, Spain, as guests of honor. This conference, which is the best-known international academic meeting in Mexico on distance education, and the most important of its type in Latin America, will once again be held in conjunction with the International Book Fair in Guadalajara. It seeks to promote the exchange of experiences, reflections, research findings and development proposals in continuing education, both at a distance and on line, through keynote speeches, panels, workshops and round tables.
Th e FIRST CREAD MEXICO CONFERENCE seeks to promote the creation and increase the competitive capacity of our small businesses in the global market, thus building new pathways towards economic growth. (see article in this newsletter) CREAD CONFERENCES 2007 EIGHTH INTERNATIONAL VIRTUAL EDUCA CONFERENCE
EIGHTH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON EDUCATION, PROFESSIONAL TRAINING, INNOVATION , COOPERATION & DEVELOPMENT BUENOS AIRES , AUGUST 23-28, 2007 This year’s theme will be “Distance Education, Health and the Environment”, and the conference will examine the following topics:
The conference will be hosted by the Instituto Universitario de Ciencias de la Salud Fundación Héctor A. Barceló, (University Institute of Health Sciences – Héctor Barceló Foundation) with Fundação Oswaldo Cruz, of Brazil, and Nova Southeastern University, of the USA, as co-organizers. The conference will offer an excellent opportunity for learning and networking for professionals, academics, instructors, institutions, officials, administrators, consultants and experts in health, distance education and telecommunications. We plan to have keynote speakers and panels of invited experts, workshops, round tables and poster presentations. The intensive academic program will be complemented by cultural activities (including tango and Argentine grill) and a tour of the beautiful city of Buenos Aires. There is a pre-registration period in which people who say that they plan to attend will receive a discount when they register. PRESIDENT EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR REPRESENTATIVE OF NOVA SOUTHEASTERN UNIVERSITY ANDEAN REGION (Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru) BRAZIL ANGLOPHONE CANADA CARIBBEAN (Antilles, Belice, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Puerto Rico, Guyana, Surinam, Venezuela) CENTRAL AMERICA (Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama) MEXICO SOUTHERN CONE (Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, Uruguay) UNITED STATES OF AMERICA LIFETIME HONORARY MEMBER CREAD REGIONAL OFFICES ARGENTINA CANADA The CREAD Electronic Newsletter will be published four times a year, in Spanish, English and Portuguese, in order to provide information about Consortium activities and to pass on professional information of interest. |
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The Distance Education Center of the Universidad Católica del Norte, in Antofagasta, Republic of Chile and CREAD’s members in the Southern Cone and Brazil, are pleased to report the successful delivery of their recent conference, the Tenth CREAD Mercosur/sul Congress on “Quality, Learning and Technology: some Challenges in Distance Education”. At this event we celebrated the 50 th anniversary of the host institution, the 25 th anniversary of the Distance Education Center (CEDUCN), a pioneer not only in Chile but also in the whole of Latin America, and the 10 th anniversary of the CREAD MERCOSUR series of conferences. 
Manuel Moreno Castañeda
The origins of the Lomas de Zamora University go back to the mid-sixties. It arose out of the need to redesign the universities of Buenos Aires and La Plata due to the growth in student population on the one hand and the increase in demand for university programs on the other, and as a consequence of a major demographic expansion of Lomas de Zamora and neighboring areas during the sixties and seventies. 
The Pontifical Catholic University Madre y Maestra was founded by the Dominican episcopate, in Santiago de los Caballeros, Dominican Republic, on September 9 th, 1962. The appellation, Madre y Maestra (Mother and Teacher) was a homage to the great social encyclical of His Holiness Pope John XXIII. The legal entity of the University and of the degrees it conferred were recognized by Dominican State Law # 6150, of December 31 st, 1962. Work at PUCMM began on November 15 th, 1962 with courses in Philosophy, Law and Education. 
As an institution, La Salle can lay claim to 350 years of educational experience and presence in the field of education, both nationally and internationally. To date, more than a million alumni have been graduated, with 75,000 teachers worldwide maintaining the quality of their education. 
The XI CREAD MERCOSUR/SUL Congress will be held in Buenos Aires, on August 23-28, 2007.