I have been around the area of e-learning and open learning for some 10 years by now, a fabulous interesting and challenging area. During the years one can say that sometimes things develops very quick and sometimes far too slow. Sweden has for long time been far ahead concerning IT development and maturity. For the third year Sweden is ranked as the most IT mature country in the world by the organization World Economic Forum, countries following Sweden are Singapore and the other Nordic countries. The ranking results concerned IT development and maturity concerning people in general, public service, government and organizations.The diagram below shows Sweden´s strengths in relations to other comparable countries. In general it shows consistently very good conditions all over the field. This is good and nice news. Our IT minister Anna-Karin Hatt recently blogged on this. She has also created and launched a digital agenda for Sweden (in Swedish), this is also very good and the agenda is very proactive and strong. Unfortunately higher education is not mentioned or considered at all. Probably as we have a separate Minister of Education...
(Source: IT Minister Anna-Karin Hatts Blog 6th April2012. http://annakarinhatt.se/blogg/sverige-varldens-mest-it-mogna-land/).
The diagram is interesting in many ways, but it also raise a lot of questions and remarks. Some questions which I can see due to national and international experiences and through networks, are questions like why are the educational sector and especially higher education so slow in modernizing education for the 21st century. Furthermore, Why are the digital competences often so low or un-priortized by teachers and managers in the educational sector in general. If we really want our education systems to prepare students for
tomorrow’s digital world, we should worry less about formats and instead
focus on what to teach – or what not to teach.Teaching screenagers is a concept worth to consider and how the digital world is changing learning. In UNESCO´s recently published report on “ The four pillars of education “ collaboration is the core element
of the four pillars.
Learning to know
Learning to do
Learning to live together
Learning to be
Learning to know
Learning to do
Learning to live together
Learning to be
Required skills for those core elements are Critical thinking; Active learning; Problem solving skills; Communicating, making connections, creating and expressing oneself in a variety of ways; and Contextualized knowledge. Such skills are mainly achieved through web2.0 technologies and social networking tools and pivotal to achieve for the 21st century pedagogy goals.
Probably one of the main questions will be:
How will higher education cope with this, and not just cope, but to be innovative, pro-active, open, eliminate borders on the digital divide and to be in the front-line... and how is the IT and digital maturity in higher education in Sweden (for sure even in many other countries) related to the diagram?
