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Episode 18/Sharing, Innovating, and Collaborating in a Global World: The View from Israel

Today, the educational world spins on collaboration and knowledge sharing. We have rapidly departed from an age when few teachers opened their doors to guest observations and putting on display one’s best practices, to age filled with the sharing of open educational resources, courses, and practices. As this has happened, open content has become increasingly accepted part of the curriculum, especially with the rise of COVID-19.

One is no longer a lone ranger when designing, developing, using, or assessing course content and associated pedagogical ideas. Instead, inter-institutional collaboration is new normal in this age of fully online e-learning and various forms of blended learning. There is an increasing need to share best practices about open educational resources and effective online learning environments. Our guests this week, Miri Shonfeld and Eli Shmueli, are pedagogical and technological experts in bringing people together from around the world to discuss vital educational ideas, issues, trends, and movements. They create consortia, mobilize educational expertise, and engage in timely faculty development and training. They will not just talk about what is going on in Israel, they will show us.

You can see the episode below, as well as some resources that were shared during the episode.

One of the parts of the episode that most resonated with the audience was a video that Miri shared.

Below are links to the slides shared by Miri and Eli.

Our guests

Dr. Miri Shonfeld

Miri Shonfeld is the academic chair of IAIE Conference 2021 (Intercultural Education in an Age of Information and Disinformation) June 27-20, 2021 (https://iaie.smkb.ac.il/). Miri Shonfeld was the head of ICT at Kibbutzim College of Education and the head of the graduate program of Technology in Education. She was involved in writing the national program for the 21th century, as well as numerous position papers. She was invited by universities all over the world to present her philosophy and pedagogy on using ICT in education and she is one of the international leaders of AACE and the EduSummit supported by UNESCO. Her research deals with online learning environments, collaborative work, intercultural links and faculty development. She received the unity award in 2018 for the TEC center from the President of Israel and from the Israeli Ministry of Education for the unique pedagogical initiative in 2013 and a prize for outstanding educational project for tolerance in 2010. She is currently the head of the Technology, Education, and Cultural Diversity (TEC) Center at Mofet Institute (https://mofet.macam.ac.il/tec/) and a faculty member of the graduate program in Technology in Education at Kibbutzim College of Education in Tel-Aviv. She maybe contacted at mirish@macam.ac.il.

Recent Book:

Shonfeld, M., & Gibson, D. (Eds.). (2019). Collaborative Learning in a Global World. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing.

Recent Articles:

  1. Shonfeld M. (2020). Online community of writing. (Vol. 73, October forthcoming). [Hebrew]*
  2. Shonfeld,, Magen-Nagar, N. (2020). The Impact of an Online Collaborative Program on Intrinsic Motivation, Satisfaction and Attitudes Towards Technology. Technology, Knowledge and Learning, 25 (2), 297–313.
  3. Shonfeld M., & Greenstein, Y. (in press). Breaking barriers to studying and teaching in virtual worlds. British Journal of Educational Technology.
  4. Shonfeld, M. (2019) Intercultural education in the digital age. In A. Tatnall (Ed.). Encyclopedia of education and information technologies. NY: Springer.
  5. Shonfeld, M. (2019) Cross-cultural alignments, fertilization, differentiation: bridging the gaps through technology. EDUsummIT 2019 Summary Reports. Members of the group: Agyei, D. D., Bourgeois, C., Cotnam-Kappel, M., Judge, M., Ng, C., Ntebutse, J. G., Quinn, M., Sherman, B., Yildiz, M. N., Williamson-Leadley, S. Retrieved from https://edusummit2019.fse.ulaval.ca/sites/edusummit2019.fse.ulaval.ca//files/TWG11-ActionAgenda.pdf *
  6. Walther, J. B., Hoter, E., Ganayem, A., & Shonfeld, M. (2015). Computer-mediated communication and the reduction of prejudice: A controlled longitudinal field experiment among Jews and Arabs in Israel. Computers in Human Behavior, 52, 550–558. (Note: This paper received the Dennis Gouran Research Award).

 

Eli Shmueli

Eli Shmueli is the Director of MEITAL, the Israeli Inter-University Centre for e-Learning (IUCEL). MEITAL assists and promotes Israeli institutions of higher education – universities and academic colleges – in advancing the use of e-learning technologies and creating opportunities for connection and collaboration between them. MEITAL also deal with acquisition and licensing of e-learning technologies, as well as serving as a center of knowledge exchange between Higher Education Institutes (HEI).

Eli has decades of experience in developing and implementing e-learning technologies in Israel’s universities and colleges and in industry. As Director of MEITAL, he has established collaborations with national and international organizations promoting open educational resources (OER) usage, such as MERLOT and OCW-C. He is a member of eduOER, a GÉANT OER metadata repository project and partner in three Erasmus+ and Horizon2020 projects. He is also active in the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe’s (PRACE) development of on-line training, such as Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs).