Een digitaal netwerk is van strategisch belang voor mens, organisatie en regio. Hoe kunnen we social media en andere vormen van digitale netwerken nu functioneel doordacht, efficiënt en effectief inzetten? Hebben we voldoende media wijsheid in pacht? Zijn we voldoende ‘digital media literate’? Aandacht voor en het ontwikkelen van digital media literacy wordt in het Horizon Report 2011 van EDUCAUSE “de belangrijkste kritieke uitdaging” voor de komende jaren genoemd. Het rapport spreekt van “een key skill voor elke discipline en professie“. Demografische ontwikkelingen als vergrijzing en ontgroening hebben gevolgen voor de arbeidsmarkt. De oplossing kan worden gezocht in employability van de beroepsbevolking: van baan- naar werkgarantie. Aangezien digital media literacy een key skill voor elke discipline en professie is en dat digitaal netwerken van strategisch belang is, is het bevorderen van digital media literacy een belangrijke randvoorwaarde voor het realiseren van employability. Deskundigheid moet door HR-diensten in kaart worden gebracht. HR-diensten kunnen met Strategisch HRM (SHRM) employability bevorderen. In het essay neem ik de lezer, met digital media literacy in zijn of haar koffertje, mee via de demografische problematiek in de regio (Limburg, Euregio) naar Zuyd (daar waar ik zelf werk).
This open access book presents a selection of the best contributions to the Digital Cities 9 Workshop held in Limerick in 2015, combining a number of the latest academic insights into new collaborative modes of city making that are firmly rooted in empirical findings about the actual practices of citizens, designers and policy makers. It explores the affordances of new media technologies for empowering citizens in the process of city making, relating examples of bottom-up or participatory practices to reflections about the changing roles of professional practitioners in the processes, as well as issues of governance and institutional policymaking.
Constante vernieuwingen op het gebied van digitale technologie in zowel prive- als publieke omgevingen kenmerken de huidige samenlevingen en benadrukken de alsmaar belangrijker wordende rol daarin voor socio-technische systemen. De uitdaging is om voorafgaand, tijdens en na de ontwikkeling van deze systemen de mens en zijn digitale, sociale en fysieke omgeving centraal te blijven stellen. Dit vraagt om een duidelijk inzicht in de behoeften, wensen en eisen van mensen, zodat deze vertaald kunnen worden naar digitale technologie die een positieve bijdrage levert aan gezondheid, welzijn en participatie. Toegepast onderzoek naar het ontwerp- en appropriatieproces van digitale technologie voor maatschappelijk welbevinden is nodig om succesvol gebruik, implementatie, evaluatie en opschaling te bevorderen. Een goede samenwerking en beter begrip van elkaars doelen, motieven en werkwijzen, tussen zowel ontwerpers en gebruikers als tussen onderzoek, onderwijs en het werkveld, zijn hiervoor absolute vereisten. Lector Digital Life dr. Somaya Ben Allouch pleit in haar rede voor meer aandacht voor een mensgerichte ontwerpaanpak van digitale technologie. Het onderzoek van het lectoraat richt zich op innovatieve, digitale technologie op het gebied van mens-systeem interactie, sensoren en hun data en creatieve methodes voor gezondheid, welzijn en participatie. In de rede zal nader worden ingegaan op hoe het onderzoek van het lectoraat Digital Life bijdraagt aan het (inter)nationale netwerk van onderzoek, onderwijs en praktijk op het snijvlak van technologie, gezondheid en welzijn.
Energy transition is key to achieving a sustainable future. In this transition, an often neglected pillar is raising awareness and educating youth on the benefits, complexities, and urgency of renewable energy supply and energy efficiency. The Master Energy for Society, and particularly the course “Society in Transition”, aims at providing a first overview on the urgency and complexities of the energy transition. However, educating on the energy transition brings challenges: it is a complex topic to understand for students, especially when they have diverse backgrounds. In the last years we have seen a growing interest in the use of gamification approaches in higher institutions. While most practices have been related to digital gaming approaches, there is a new trend: escape rooms. The intended output and proposed innovation is therefore the development and application of an escape room on energy transition to increase knowledge and raise motivation among our students by addressing both hard and soft skills in an innovative and original way. This project is interdisciplinary, multi-disciplinary and transdisciplinary due to the complexity of the topic; it consists of three different stages, including evaluation, and requires the involvement of students and colleagues from the master program. We are confident that this proposed innovation can lead to an improvement, based on relevant literature and previous experiences in other institutions, and has the potential to be successfully implemented in other higher education institutions in The Netherlands.
Teachers have a crucial role in bringing about the extensive social changes that are needed in the building of a sustainable future. In the EduSTA project, we focus on sustainability competences of teachers. We strengthen the European dimension of teacher education via Digital Open Badges as means of performing, acknowledging, documenting, and transferring the competencies as micro-credentials. EduSTA starts by mapping the contextual possibilities and restrictions for transformative learning on sustainability and by operationalising skills. The development of competence-based learning modules and open digital badge-driven pathways will proceed hand in hand and will be realised as learning modules in the partnering Higher Education Institutes and badge applications open for all teachers in Europe.Societal Issue: Teachers’ capabilities to act as active facilitators of change in the ecological transition and to educate citizens and workforce to meet the future challenges is key to a profound transformation in the green transition.Teachers’ sustainability competences have been researched widely, but a gap remains between research and the teachers’ practise. There is a need to operationalise sustainability competences: to describe direct links with everyday tasks, such as curriculum development, pedagogical design, and assessment. This need calls for an urgent operationalisation of educators’ sustainability competences – to support the goals with sustainability actions and to transfer this understanding to their students.Benefit to society: EduSTA builds a community, “Academy of Educators for Sustainable Future”, and creates open digital badge-driven learning pathways for teachers’ sustainability competences supported by multimodal learning modules. The aim is to achieve close cooperation with training schools to actively engage in-service teachers.Our consortium is a catalyst for leading and empowering profound change in the present and for the future to educate teachers ready to meet the challenges and act as active change agents for sustainable future. Emphasizing teachers’ essential role as a part of the green transition also adds to the attractiveness of teachers’ work.
This project develops a European network for transdisciplinary innovation in artistic engagement as a catalyst for societal transformation, focusing on immersive art. It responds to the professionals in the field’s call for research into immersive art’s unique capacity to ‘move’ people through its multisensory, technosocial qualities towards collective change. The project brings together experts leading state-of-the-art research and practice in related fields with an aim to develop trajectories for artistic, methodological, and conceptual innovation for societal transformation. The nascent field of immersive art, including its potential impact on society, has been identified as a priority research area on all local-to-EU levels, but often suffers from the common (mis)perception as being technological spectacle prioritising entertainment values. Many practitioners create immersive art to enable novel forms of creative engagement to address societal issues and enact change, but have difficulty gaining recognition and support for this endeavour. A critical challenge is the lack of knowledge about how their predominantly sensuous and aesthetic experience actually lead to collective change, which remains unrecognised in the current systems of impact evaluation predicated on quantitative analysis. Recent psychological insights on awe as a profoundly transformative emotion signals a possibility to address this challenge, offering a new way to make sense of the transformational effect of directly interacting with such affective qualities of immersive art. In parallel, there is a renewed interest in the practice of cultural mediation, which brings together different stakeholders to facilitate negotiation towards collective change in diverse domains of civic life, often through creative engagements. Our project forms strategic grounds for transdisciplinary research at the intersection between these two developments. We bring together experts in immersive art, psychology, cultural mediation, digital humanities, and design across Europe to explore: How can awe-experiences be enacted in immersive art and be extended towards societal transformation?
