Ah, Sevilla... First conference day

And finally I'm here, at the Facultá de Communication, where m-ICTE is held this year. Not so difficult to find: with Google maps or likely services you really can't lose yourself anymore.

Among today's presentations (about 100 lectures during the whole conference!) something interesting emerged, that I report here. This morning I learned that there are some certification of e-learning quality, at least three (EFMD, CEL and SCIL) and they tell not always the obvious: (a) you should have surveys form the trainees about their feelings in the distance learning experiences; (b) these surveys show that videogame-learning style is preferred and (c) that mostly production workload don't enter the curriculum (neither teachers' nor students') -- this is a major problem in the field. A great spreadsheet about surveys was presented by Wannemacher.

Vicki L. Cohen ahd a very interesting talk about the literacy in our time. Our pupils learn to read through blogs, for instance, iPods, chats, text messaging, far more than on printed books. Which kind of new literacies get involved in reading e-text? We should teach students (a) how to select keywords in order to better googling, otherwise they browse only by clicks in trusted portals; (b) they learn factual knowledge instead of posing conceptual questions, and consequently (c) they do not know how to select reliable web sources and they try to find only one answer to the question, even if there are more possible good answers. She ese in classes a mind map software for kids called kidspiration. She is publishing a textbook about these topics, by sure worth a look.

An other fil rouge of the presentation was the use of videogames, especially to teach hard sciences such as maths or engineering -- a K-12 student example for Taiwan learners of English was presented. An interesting task was explaingin own land's holydays -- why esperantists don't do the same sort of things? I found useful insights form the notschool.net experience. They do use videogames to reach teenagers that abandoned school, and they explained their pedagogical method with a eBay or Wikipedia metaphor: learners seek out teachers form a wide available range of sources, as in these popular web sites. You should propose the best offer!

Yvonne Barnard form Eurisco showed a 4-level model to evaluate learning improvement, by Kirkpatrick, which is adaptable in a lot of contexts: (1) reaction of the trainess; (2) learning as improved knowledge, skills and attitudes; (3) behaviour, i.e. improvements in actual work and (4) results, i.e. organizational benefits. It's trivial to observe that without (3) and (4) your teaching method is a failure.