self-directing competence development in Higher Education April 23, 2008
Posted by kieslinger in : Uncategorized , 1 comment so farYesterday I was attending a talk by Kai Pata from Talllinn University at the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration. The title of the talk was: Designing E-Learning Experiences for Soft Competence Acquisition.
After the approx. 1 hour presentation (which by the way also included some insights into the recent iCamp field trials) a short discussion followed around the appropriateness of certain technological landscapes for specific professional skills teaching.
One of the questions brought forward was about the importance of teaching of competencies such as self-directing or collaboration – apart from factual knowledge and professional skills – at Higher University.
I think that this is a very important issue that Higher Education institutions (HEI) should dedicate more attention to. Although I am not working at any HEI I do have the feeling that it is currently the individual lecturer who decides how much he/she would like to support the advancement of students self-directing competencies, apart from the pure “content” teaching.
Challenging situations have to be created, students need to be able to experiment, but they also might need some guidance and scaffolds from the more experienced. This might be a challenge not only for the students but also for a lot of teachers, who may learn something as well during the process. This requires a certain attitude and openness from all sides.
Would be interesting to see how HEI have this competence development anchored in their teaching strategies.
proposals submitted April 9, 2008
Posted by kieslinger in : news , add a commentthe last weeks were very busy with proposal preparations as the third ICT Call within the 7th Frameworkprogramme of the European Commission closed on the 8th of April.
Let’s see if any of our proposals will be successful. Tough competition, especially in the areas of our research. In Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) the assigned budget for funding decreases while the number of competing proposers increases.
I suppose that it is similar for the “Intelligent Content and Semantics” objective of the workprogramme. Nevertheless we submitted a proposal to this area that is specifically targeted towards the Creative Industries. I would really like to see this proposal succeed, but who knows.
Who else is in this proposal? Here is a link to find out:
http://technikundwissen.zsi.at/?p=20
Apart from that we have also been involved in two other smaller scale RTD projects, one bigger RTD project and a network of excellence. All in the TEL area.
Yes, me and my colleges from the ZSI have been very busy these days, weeks and months.