Welcome to my blog on Quality, elearning, OER, OEP, OEC, and user generated content (UGC)


The posts in my blog will be both in English and Swedish.
Blogposterna kommer att vara både på svenska och engelska.

Wednesday, April 11, 2012

To be in the front-line


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...


http://annakarinhatt.se/blogg/?p=1953
(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

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?