Digital skills for life and work - report

From the unesco website: 17 September 2017

A new report from the Broadband Commission entitled “Digital skills for life and work” shows that education systems worldwide are only just beginning to help learners cultivate the digital skills they need to excel in in our increasingly digitized societies.

The report, released today, highlights the emergence of a new global skills gap where gender, class, geography and age can have a huge impact on whether a person is able to harness new technologies or not. It also presents strategies for ensuring all groups of people can develop these skills.

Report URL: http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0025/002590/259013e.pdf

Media release from the Chief Scientist Office

Australian students have new options at their fingertips with the launch of a national searchable database of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) activities.

STARportal is the nation’s first dedicated platform connecting students, parents and teachers with STEM events in their local community, as well as online activities.

It is a completely free service for users and STEM event providers, with more than 330 activities already listed.

Industry, Innovation and Science Minister Senator Arthur Sinodinos AO today launched STARportal at Parliament House in Canberra, as part of National Science Week.

http://www.chiefscientist.gov.au/2017/08/media-release-expanding-stem-options-for-all-australian-students/ 

STARportal can be found at www.starportal.edu.au

LinkedUp: Linking Open Data for Education

4 February 2014 - 2:12pm

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Marieke Guy, Mathieu d’Aquin,Stefan Dietze, Hendrik Drachsler,Eelco Herder and Elisabetta Parodidescribe the activities carried out by the LinkedUp Project looking at the promotion of open data in education.

Table of Contents [hide]

1. Open and Linked Web Data
2. Open and Linked Data in UK Higher Education
3. The LinkedUp Challenge
4. Evaluation Framework
5. Use Cases
6. Data Catalogue
7. Open Education Network
8. Conclusions
9. References
10. Author Details

In the past, discussions around Open Education have tended to focus on content and primarily Open Educational Resources (OER), freely accessible, openly licensed resources that are used for teaching, learning, assessment and research purposes. However Open Education is a complex beast made up of many aspects, of which the opening up of data is one important element.

When one mentions open data in education a multitude of questions arise: from the technical (what is open data? What is linked data? How do I create open datasets?), the semantic (what is the difference between Open Education data and open data in education?) to the more philosophical (what exactly is Open Education anyway? How can we make sure ‘open’ means ‘accessible to all’? How can opening up data be helpful?) All valid questions, yet not all with straight-forward answers; however exploration around what might purport to be answers to these questions is very much in scope for the LinkedUp Project.

The LinkedUp Project (Linking Web data for education) [1] is an EU FP7 Coordination and Support Action running from November 2012 to November 2014 which looks at issues around open data in education, with the aim of pushing forward the exploitation of the vast amounts of public, open data available on the Web. It aspires to do this by facilitating developer competitions and deploying an evaluation framework, which identifies innovative success stories of robust, Web-scale information management applications. The project comprises six pan-European consortium partners [2] led by the L3S Research Center of the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Universität Hannover and consisting of the Open University UK, the Open Knowledge Foundation, Elsevier, the Open Universiteit Nederland and eXact learning LCMS. The project also has a number of associated partners [3] with an interest in the project including the Commonwealth of Learning, Canada and the Department of Informatics, PUC-Rio, Brazil.

http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue72/guy-et-al

Reduced Tuition for Online Digital Curation Program

 Out-of-state and international students can now enjoy a dramatically discounted tuition for courses in the University of Maine’s Digital Curation Certificate program, provided they begin coursework by fall 2014.

Courses offered in the Fall include  DIG 500 (Introduction to Digital Curation), which covers how digital artifacts are made, acquired into collections, and tracked, including legal and technical considerations and DIG 540 (Digital Collections and Exhibitions), which covers how to gather material in a database and put it on the Web.

Although the certificate is designed to be completed in two years, part-time students may cherry-pick individual courses or spread the 18 credits (6 courses) over a longer period. To make things easier for students currently working in collecting institutions, we have designed the final course as an internship that may take place in the student's own workplace.

You can find up-to-date information about the program, including a link to register for courses, at: http://digitalcuration.umaine.edu