Fighting the Digital Divide through Education
Reflections & Conclusions
UOC UNESCO Chair in e-Learning
Barcelona, November 14, 2008

The real fact of the digital divide
• Multiple factors
• Many different (digital) divides, in relationship to
context: culture, geography, education, wealth
• Where to start? Many and different approaches

Importance of the “digital” issue
• The “digital” embedded in the socioeconomic divide
• The “digital” embedded in the education divide
• What’s the relationship between digital and analogue
variables

ICT4D
• Awareness raising
• Build from previous experience (e.g. best practices)
• Open processes, open outputs, open participation
• If added value, will to pay (i.e. impact and sustainability)
• Evaluation, assessment

Community
• Communities of practice
• Leveraging communities by focusing on their needs
• Self-organization
• Partnerships
• Networks
• Distributed agoras to debate

ICTs and Education
• Technology not to replace the teacher
• Need to train teachers in ICT usage
• Who’s the expert? The role of youngsters
• Relevance of open content (i.e. OER)
• The networked, multidisciplinary and multicultural
teacher & faculty
• Gain from system disruptions to review teaching &
assessment

Digital literacies
• Multiple literacies: textual, visual... and language
• Evolving and pervasive nature of digital literacies
• Digital skills as part of the curriculum, embedded in the
whole educational process
• ICTs as a language, not just technology
• Training the trainers, educating the educators

What’s next? (VI Seminar 2009)
• Best strategies of knowledge diffusion
• Semantic web in Education
• Teacher training in the Information Society
• Awareness raising in policy-makers and decision-takers
• Education for citizenship, values and attitudes
• Back to open education
• Social learning, peer learning, emergent learning

Barcelona, November 14, 2008. Fighting the Digital Divide through Education
UOC UNESCO Chair in e-Learning Fifth International Seminar
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http://unescochair.blogs.uoc.edu/
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