Ale Okada

Nov 21, 20132 min read

A high profile Massive Open Event on 21st Century Education

Alexandra Okada, Thursday 21 November 2013

The 7th International Conference on Education (from April 2012 - November 2013) organised by Fundación Telefónica, is the 1st Massive Open Event on 21st Century Education. It brings together symposiums in many countries as well as a virtual network environment (Encuentro.Educared.org) for large scale discussion.

Ale Okada was a keynote at the finale event on the 12-13th November in Madrid with an audience of more than 700. Okada presented “Key competences for co-learning and co-inquiry in the digital age” describing a case study about Telefonica's Conference Portal (Encuentro.Educared.org) and weSPOT - working environment with social, personal and open technologies for inquiry based learning (wespot.kmi.open.ac.uk). She also facilitated the closing webconference about "Key Competences for co-learning in open massive environments and Augment Reality in Education, yesterday, 20th of November.

More than 50.000 people registered in the Telefonica 's portal, including teachers, parents, head teachers, students, and educators. 5.000 active participants from South and Central America and Spain interacted in discussion forums, chats, web conferences and social groups.

The Conference was organised around nine themes: 1. Society and work; 2. Technologies and Environments; 3. Digital Age; 4. Teach and learning; 5. The role of educators; 6. Changes and Leadership; 7. Family; 8. Formal, Informal and Non-Formal Learning, 9. Vision and Trends. More than 80 on-site events were organised over a two year period for approximately 700 attendees per meeting including policy makers, journalists and other Institutions.

The events attracted 300 international experts, renowned scholars and education specialists worldwide such as John Moravec, Judi Harris, Richard Gerver, George Siemens, Alejandro Piscitelli, Roger Schank, Alberto J.Cañas, David Albury, Ferran Ruiz, César Coll, Daniel Contreras,Stephen Downes, Juan Domingo Farnós, Fernando Savater, ...

UNESCO - the World Science Day for Peace and Development

Alexandra Okada, Monday 18 November 2013

Established by UNESCO in 2001, World Science Day for Peace and Development is celebrated worldwide on 10 November each year. The Day is an occasion to recall UNESCO's mandate and commitment to science. This annual event was instigated as follow-up to the World Conference on Science, organized jointly by UNESCO and the International Council on Science in Budapest (Hungary) in 1999.

The Day offers an opportunity to reaffirm each year our commitment to attaining the goals proclaimed in one of the twin documents adopted by the World Conference on Science: the Declaration on Science and the Use of Scientific Knowledge and to follow up the recommendations contained in the Conference’s Science Agenda: Framework for Action.

Ale Okada was invited to participate in the World Conference on Science 2013. She presented two European projects whose aim is to foster scientific cooperation between scientists, researchers, educators, learners and citizens through co-inquiry based learning.

The WeSPOT project (Working environments with social, personal and open technologies for inquiry based learning) started in October 2012, and is being led by Dr Ale Okada and Dr Alexander Mikroyannidis. It aims at propagating scientific inquiry as the approach for collaborative science learning and teaching in combination with today’s curricula and teaching practices. WeSPOT will support the meaningful contextualization of scientific concepts by relating them to personal curiosity, experiences, and reasoning. The ENGAGE project (Equipping the Next Generation for Active Engagement in Science) is starting in January 2014, led by Dr. Ale Okada. Its aim is to help teachers develop the beliefs, knowledge and classroom practice for RRI (Responsible Research and Innovation) teaching. This requires adopting a more co-inquiry based methodology, which gives students opportunity for self-expression and responsibility for coming to informed decisions thorugh collaborative and open scientific research projects.

Both KMi Projects ( weSPOT and ENGAGE) highlight the rationale behind celebrating World Science Day each year, which is rooted in the need for a new social contract for science, one which acknowledges the importance of the role science, educators and scientists play in creating sustainable societies and which ensures that citizens (including all learners) are kept informed of developments in science and empowered to participate in science. Our case studies in the UK, Brazil, Portugal and Spain aim to build bridges between science and society through co-learning and co-inquiry by engaging intergovernmental and non-governmental organisations, scientific research institutions, professional associations, the media, science educators and schools (teachers and students). Related Links:

Alexandra Okada

Sep 3, 20131 min read

Knowledge Cartography: The top 10 of the most downloaded books

Alexandra Okada, Tuesday 03 September 2013 |

The book Knowledge Cartography: Software Tools and Mapping Techniques.edited by Okada, A., Buckingham Shum, S. and Sherborne, T. was launched on 4th of November 2008 - 400 pages, with all the maps and images in colour!

It is a great pleasure to announce that the 2nd edition of this book will be published in 2014 by Springer .

Since its online publication, there has been a total of 6642 chapter downloads on SpringerLink online platform.

Over the last year(s) the download figures have been as follows: 2012: 1015 Downloads 2011: 1559 Downloads 2010: 1520 Downloads

This book was considered one of the top most downloaded eBooks in the relevant Springer eBook Collection (The Advanced Information and Knowledge Processing Series) in 2012.

Contact: Alexandra Okada