Insight Blog

An online survey has been recently launched by the European Commission in order to find out what young people think about EU space activities. Günter Verheugen, Vice President in charge among others of European Space Research and Industry, invites kids aged 6 to 14 living in Europe to take part in the survey by 1 June 2009. The Space questionnaire is available online in 21 languages at http://surveys.publications.europa.eu/formserver/space.

Young people’s answers will help Vice President Verheugen and his colleagues to plan the future direction of European space activities. The results of the survey will be presented at the Conference on Space Exploration in Prague in June 2009.

For further information:

- Xplora
http://www.xplora.org/ww/en/pub/xplora/events/calendar/space_survey.htm

- European Space Policy
http://ec.europa.eu/enterprise/space/index_en.html

- European Space Agency (ESA)
http://www.esa.int/esaCP/index.html

Posted by Lucia Sali at 11:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Latin America is strenghtening its presence in the educational portals panorama: in March it has welcomed two newcomers, PerúEduca and Educ@tico, the national educational portals respectively of Peru and Costa Rica. Both are part of the Red Latinoamérica de Portales de Educativos (RELPE, Latinamerican Network of Educational Portals).

PerúEduca, which has been prelaunched on 25 March 2009, aims at providing the educational community with learning resources and a common platform where teachers, students and institutions can improve their pedagogical strategy through collaborative work. Especially for 2009, which is the year of Astronomy, the portal will also feature a virtual Telescope allowing for the observation of galaxies, planets and stars.

“PerúEduca is the result of the efforts made by Dirección General de Tecnologías Educativas (DIGETE, Directorate General of Educational Technologies), in order to put ICT at the service of education”, the DIGETE director Oscar Manuel Becerra Tresierra explained.

Educ@tico, on the other hand, has been fully online since 19 March 2009. It provides the educational community with learning resources, software, tools for collaborative learning, and space where schools or other educational institutions can create their own website. It also aims at fostering debate, good practice and knowledge sharing among teachers.

The portal is a project developed by the Dirección de Recursos Tecnológicos en Educación (Directorate of Educational Technological Resources) of Costa Rica together with Microsoft. “We hope to improve the development of new learning scenarios through ICT tools that the educational community should be able to use in order to access different learning resources and take part in collaborative learning environments”, the DG director Kattia Solórzano stated.

- PerúEduca
http://www.perueduca.edu.pe
- Educ@tico
http://www.educatico.ed.cr
- Red Latinoamérica de Portales de Educativos (RELPE)
http://www.relpe.org

Posted by Lucia Sali at 01:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

To what extent can ICT contribute to support assessment in today’s context and what can policy do for ensuring transition from traditional to e-assessment and its effective implementation? A new report by the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission, “The Transition to Computer-Based Assessment. New Approaches to Skills Assessment and Implications for Large-scale Testing”, provides an insight into this complex issue. Although there is a strong need of further research in the field, the conclusions show that the complexity of computer-based testing related issues to take into account increases with the use of computer technology. But still, it would be a wrong consequence to stop further activities because of the complexity of the challenges, as the potential benefits far outweigh the problems.

The report, edited by Friedrich Scheuermann and Julius Björnsson, gathers paper presentations and conclusions from the research workshop “The Transition to Computer-based Assessment – Lessons learned from the PISA 2006 Computer Based Assessment of Sciences (CBAS) and implications for large scale testing”, held in Reykjavik, Iceland, on 29 September-1 October 2008. Furthermore, it includes a variety of additional articles covering the most relevant issues addressed by the workshop.

The papers are grouped into five sections focusing each on the following topics:
- Assessment needs and European approaches, in the context of comparative surveys on the use for educational policy;
- General issues of computer-based testing, including experiences and challenges posed;
- Moving from Paper-and-pencil Testing to Computer-based Testing, dedicated to experiences and reflections on the transition between these two different ways of assessment;
- Methodologies of Computer-based Testing, where design, testing and interpretation of results are discussed;
- The PISA Computer-based Assessment of Scientific literacy, focusing on the experiences made with the PISA 2006 pilot study in computer-based assessment of science (CBAS).

The full report “The Transition to Computer-Based Assessment. New Approaches to Skills Assessment and Implications for Large-scale Testing” is available in the Insight Library at:
http://resources.eun.org/insight/reporttransition.pdf

Posted by Lucia Sali at 02:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)