Teachers needs to think about how to create Open Information Systems in order to their students could use their Personal Learning Environments. We'll present an example of how to build them.
Some teachers love the idea of create Personal Learning Environment in order to make possible for their students to configure the way they want to organize their task, to access to the open content which they or their colleagues have created, and finally to learn. Social web has promised several technologies to make possible such thing and lots of teachers are implementing those technologies in their classrooms.
Our presentation is focusing on the idea that teachers needs to aim their efforts to design the open information system with the content and services they think are of interest for their students and let the students decide how to use it instead of thinking only about which technology will support their PLE's,
Teachers should create those systems using the technology available in order to syndicate their open content or to easily use services and be sure the student owns the technical skills to accomplish it.
Our presentation is showing an example of the methodology we have applied to design an Open Information System in order to be used by students in a higher education context. Also, we?ll provide information about academic achievement and student's evaluation of their own learning process.
Open Information Systems are for Open Content
An Open Information System can be defined as a system configured to grant the access without restrictions to anybody or any other system to the information available. The open content is not open if it is not available in such way. To facilitate at maximum the availability of the content, the open system has to offer a number of capabilities like visibility, discovering, sorting by criteria and easy delivering.
Open Information Systems in an easy way
Create an information system is not enough if it cannot be accessed in an easy way or there are too many barriers for it. (security + privacy + technical difficulty + incompatible formats + linguistic +?.) After designing the information system, to choose the right technology is one of the keys in order to create a system that the average-skilled student could use.
The making-off
Considering all these premises, during last academic year we decided to address our efforts to produce open content and to create an open information system that the students could use.
One of the student's task was to create learning objects using a tool called eXelearning, which is widely used in the Spanish educational world. The students have to deliver their work under an open license to the Open Information System created.
We are going to present an example of an Open Information System we have created using wikis, question&answers systems, blogs and mobile devices and the results in terms of academic achievement and learning experience satisfaction in the students.