Call for Abstracts: Symposium on Education for Digital Equity

Friday, 12 Feb 2016

This is a call for abstracts for workshop Symposium on Education for Digital Equity held as part of IFIP TC3 Joint Open Conference, Stakeholders and Information Technology in Education, SaITE 2016, to be held in Guimaraes (PT) on July 6-8, 2016.

This symposium provides an opportunity to present and learn about recent academic trends on the topic of Information Communication Technologies Education for reaching Digital Equity [1]. Education is one of the initial key factors for this goal. However, there are different aspects that fix the characteristics of the education. These main aspects are:

Level of knowledge to be given to the students according the type of use they will do of ICT. There two categories of education:
- For final ICT users: Basic user, Advanced user, Expert in installation and maintenance, Hardware and/or software design, ICT researcher, etc.
- For ICT educators appropriate to this different types of users.
Economic level of the country: depending if it is a developed or developing country.
Gender issues

As Digital Equity can be considered as a transversal aspect to all Action Lines of the ITU World Summit in Information Society (WSIS) and this ones are closely related with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) proposed by the United Nations [2], we can accept that to work for the Digital Equity represents to work for attaining the SDG.

The IFIP conference attracts participants from different parts of the world, developing as well developed countries. All the conference participants will be welcome to the symposium to help to enrich its conclusions.

Objectives

The objectives will intend to focus the aspects presented in the introduction mainly:

Type of education to be delivered depending on the type of user
Type of education to be delivered depending on the type of country
Type of education to be delivered depending on the gender
Entities that should deliver each type of teaching
Where the educators can be found

Symposium Outline

The program will be organized as follows:

Introductions to the concept of Digital Equity
Presentations by the participants on the different aspects they consider as important
Discussions
Conclusions

References

[1] International Society for Technology Education: Digital Equity Toolkit – Working Draft, 2006.

[2] World Summit in Information Society: WSIS-SDG Matrix Linking WSIS Action Lines with Sustainable Development Goals, http://www.itu.int/net4/wsis/sdg/Content/wsis-sdg_matrix_document.pdf.