2023
WLS
World Learning Summit
Fall Roundtable
Kristiansand, Norway, September 28
Exploring media literacy
— Technologies in context
MAKING SENSE OF DIGITAL TRANSFORMATIONS • MAKING SENSE WITH LEARNING INNOVATIONS
ROUNDTABLE INVITATION
Artificial intelligence is the latest of many communication technologies that have shaped and re-shaped human learning. Like before, the coming of new technologies challenges us as learners, students and educators to explore, adapt, reject, and critique. Our Fall 2023 Roundtable continues conversations from earlier WLS conference events on learning, education and media literacy. Speakers from Northern and Southern Europe, North and South America, Asia and Africa join in shaping a future learning & research agenda.
There is still time to join in: WLS network members, students, teachers, and University of Agder staff will receive a free promotion code event ticket by filling in the request form below the event ticket form.
1: Why this concern with communication technologies and digital transformation? At our hosting network Future Learning Lab we have invited conversation on these sorts of issues for the past 15 years. In that period we have seen radical changes in the ways and means by which students, educators and learning institutions are affected by technology developments. We have gone through COVID-19 and “shock digitalization”. Somehow we have returned to the idea that “back to campus” is the way to go. But is that the whole story?
2: In 2022 Chat GPT happened. What happened, really? The idea that machine generated texts and images become ubiquitous and difficult to discern from human-made texts, raises core issues. Of course. But many of us seek advice and peer experience discussions in order to articulate those concerns. A good idea is talk. So we will.
3: We believe that the best way to approach the challenges of technologies impacting on learning, learning interactions and learning institutions is to invite them in: Getting to know how technologies work is a good start in the process of learning how to make use of them, to avoid them, and to become wise in choosing which and why.
KEYNOTE SPEAKER:
ALEXANDRE LE VOCI SAYAD
To kick off the discussions, we have invited Brazilian author, journalist and researcher Alex Le Voci Sayad to introduce us to to his ideas on Media and Information Literacy (MIL). He has worked for a long time with the UNESCO MIL Alliance where he is Co-chairman.
Alex is currently director of ZeitGeist advisory company and member of the board of the IC4ML (International Council for Media Literacy). At ZeitGeist, Sayad coordinates programs and consultancies for private and public schools, companies, governments and non-profit organisations in the whole country, focused on innovation and media literacy.
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Visiting scholar
Dr. MUHAMMAD ZUHDI
Joining us from Jakarta, Indonesia is professor Muhammad Zuhdi. He is a senior lecturer at the Faculty of Education and the Head of Quality Assurance Institute of UIN Syarif Hdiayatullah Jakarta.
Dr. Zuhdi will speak on the theme of “STUDENT WELL-BEING”. Increasingly, students want more from higher education institutions beyond skills and knowledge, graduation certificates and the promise of employment. They also want care and guidance. Students even want to actively collaborate on their university’s quality assurance processes and add health and well-being as key indicators of university quality.
However, universities often end up ignoring students’ needs. Although they once might have been the main clients of higher education, universities now give priority to market-driven quality indicators set by industries and governments.
To read more, check out this article in The Conversation.
Speakers and themes
Panelists and hosts
Thomas Bauer
Thomas Bauer is professor emeritus at the University of Vienna, Austria, where he has headed up the development of communication studies for a long time. He is a widely used speaker with a large international scope of experiences. Since 2010 the acting president of the ESEC (the European Society for Education and Communication). His academic work always has been oriented to international relations. Based on this interest, he accepted several invitations as a visiting professor at universities in different countries of Asia, Latin America, the USA, and the Balkans. Since 2015 he has been the scientific coordinator of a Media Literacy Program, co-founded by the EU, realized with academic partners from Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, Netherlands and Germany.
Ebba Ossiannilsson
Iyad el-Baghdadi
Iyad el-Baghdadi is a prominent Arab Spring intellectual, writer, and activist. A career entrepreneur, he had over a decade’s experience with start-ups when the Arab uprisings started in 2011. Over the next few years, his Twitter account became among the most influential and respected – ultimately leading in 2014 to him being arrested, jailed, and eventually exiled from the United Arab Emirates, due to his pro-democracy activism. Iyad is a self-described «Islamic libertarian», and writes on issues related to Islam & liberty, the Arab Spring, and Middle East & Arab world affairs; he also writes about radicalization, Jihadist ideology, and populism. His professional expertise is in start-up consultancy, project management, new media, and IT.
Daniel Nordgård
Daniel Nordgård is professor in music business and management and the author of the book The Music Business and Digital Impacts (2018). Nordgård’s research and publications focus on understanding better the music industries’ digital transitions.
Daniel is director of CreaTeME, UiAs new Center for Excellence in Creative use of Technology in Music Education. He sits on the board of the International Music Business Research Association (IMBRA) and is member of the editorial board of the International Journal of Music Business Research. Nordgård is regularly invited as guest speaker at music business conferences and academic conferences, nationally and internationally, and is regularly used as expert by policy makers and legislators.
June Breivik
June Breivik is Assistant head of the Secretariat at the Norwegian Education Association. She is a former development manager of e-learning of LearningLab – a competence center for innovative teaching at BI Norwegian Business School (BI). A key part of Junes job was to assist the school in the digital transformation of learning. BI School of Business is arguably the best case of successful digital transformation in the Nordic context of higher education.
June has worked with technology and learning as a principal in primary and secondary education, and as a project manager for Digital school, a project to implement digital tools for learning in upper secondary education, focusing on content, competence, infrastructure and leadership. The project involved 46 schools and 24 000 students.
June was also a member for the Norwegian MOOC-commission appointed by the Norwegian government to look into how online learning impacts higher education.
Josef Rebenda and Yuriy Rogovchenko
The presentation has two elements: First, a presentation of an Erasmus+ Strategic Partnership project) on Improving students’ learning from educational videos with the help of eye tracking. Thius is one of eight case studies in the main project.
Secondly, an overview of the main project of which the case study is a part: Outcomes of the project “Boosting Sustainable Digital Education for European Universities (BoostEdU)” including the other seven case studies.
PhD student panelists
Lee M. Schults
Solomon Kebede Gebremeskel
Manisha Mishra
Roundtable coordinators
Vidar Mortensen
Roundtable co-coordinator
Henning Eidfjord
Featured presentations
Morten Flate Paulsen
Paulsen is a pioneer in international online education. He is the president of NooA online campus. In 1987, he was probably Europe’s first online teacher when he led the development of NKI from correspondence school to online school. He worked for NKI for 30 years and for most of that time he was development manager for NKI’s online studies. He has participated in numerous EU projects and delivered many international lectures. He is author of 100+ articles, reports, and books on online education.
Based on a project he is currently working on and as featured talk at our Roundtable, Morten has chosen this theme: 13 Technologies that Transformed Education.
Erik Sørbø
Session: Future Education
To kick off our discussion in the workshop session labeled Future Education, we have invited Eirik Sørbø to present some ideass from his work in music education. Erik recently completed his doctoral thesis “Developing Practices and Approaches to Electronic Popular Music Education,” focusing on how continental educational theory, particularly represented by the theories of Gert Biesta, can inform electronic popular music education in terms of what and how we teach.
He is currently Project Developer and Work Package Leader in CreaTeME (Center for Excellence in Creative use of Technology in Music Education) and Project Leader of studX (a project on student active learning and student expertise in music education). His interests are mainly on how music education can adapt to technological developments in ways that foster originality and citizenship.
Per Ivar Kjærgård
Session: Technology in context:
The following abstract is in Norwegian — translation coming
I desember 2022 havnet kunstig intelligens (KI) plutselig på alles lepper. Blant mange utfordringer med snakkeroboten ChatGPT ble det særlig løftet frem at risikoen for fusk og plagiat kunne øke når elever og studenter får tilgang til hjelpemidler som kan produsere relativt gode tekster til tross for begrenset tilførsel av informasjon fra brukeren. På den annen side så innebærer teknologien også en rekke nye muligheter, ikke minst for brukere som av ulike årsaker sliter med å produsere egne tekster.
Denne studien søker å kaste lys over hvordan vitenskapelige ansatte ved norske UH-institusjoner vurderer styrker, svakheter, muligheter og trusler knyttet til KI-baserte hjelpemidler. Et av de områdene teknologien utfordrer er studenters arbeid med læring gjennom å utvikle egne skriftlige tekster. I dette forskningsprosjektet setter vi fokus på hvilke implikasjoner teknologien gir for veiledning av studenters arbeid med tekst og kildebruk. Et av de teoretiske perspektivene som vil bli trukket inn i drøftingen av en slik ny teknologi er Mishra og Kohlers teoretiske rammeverket TPCK (The Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge). Dette rammeverket setter fokus på behovet for den sammensatte kompetansen en lærer trenger når teknologi integreres så tett i læringsarbeidet.
Oddgeir Tveiten
w/Muhammad Zuhdi
A 2021-22 online survey of students at the University of Agder (865 respondents) is now being prepared for a qualitative follow-up where students are engaged to define a set of focus-group interactions. The background for the 2021-22 survey was the felt impact of COVID-19 and the lock-down that followed. Based on survey responses, the follow-up seeks to add a broader understanding of students´media use, as well as students´points of view concerning the future development of hybrid learning scenarios.
Based of this introduction, the roundtable will seek to draw connections between the various presentations and the greater theme of “student well-being” as a key component in higher education planning and design.
Kristoffer Holt
Professor in Media and Communication at the Dept. of Media and Journalism (MJ), Linnæus University, Kalmar/Växjö, Sweden. Research interests include alternative media, media ethics, media criticism as well as media and populism, political communication and participatory and citizen media and media and religion.
At the Roundtable, Kristoffer will share insights from his current work on alternative media and journalism, in an age of emergent social media and digital transformation. Audience relations and media relations of power undergoing change, how might these developments be reflected in revised communication education designs?
Judith Ann Molka-Danielsen
Molka-Danieslen, (PhD 1998), present research is exploring design and use of virtual and augmented technology in active learning design in several educational domains, including distance education, lifelong learning in the disciplines of language learning for international business students and collaborative writing for health professionals. She leads project Erasmus-plus Strategic Partnership AR-FOR-EU (NO01-KA203-034192, 2017-2020), that strengthens offers in AR education by designing 2 courses on AR for university bachelor and masters students.
Mulatu Alemayehu Moges
Dr. Alemayhu M. Mulatu is an Ethiopian journalism educator and former journalist who now resides in Oslo at OSLOMET University in SAR program after the security people targeted him for attack physically and psychologically and mistreated him at his home in Addis Ababa a few months ago. He has participated in several Norway-financed projects to develop journalism education in Ethiopia, which is the background for his talk at the Roundtable. Ethiopian journalism has become increasingly embedded in an intensified ethnification, pitting different ethnic groups against each other with competing narratives of the current civil war. Professor Mulatu will speak about various challenges that this scenario raises for professional journalism education in the country.
