networks

An online social network will be put in place for care-workers, experts, researchers and pracitioners with relevance to ICT competences in care-systems, and a set of workshops for care-workers will be organised to pilot the elaborated professional development pathways and tools.

What resonates amongst both groups – care workers and care recipients – is their exposure to the risk of social exclusion as they are both often at the margins of society and likely to be the victim of digital and social divides. ICTs and associated competences have been shown to be a critical component in mitigating these risks of exclusion and helping to support an increased quality of life. The acquisition of digital skills is essential for these actors in the family employment sector where we find over half of all private individual employers aged 60 years old and over, and low-skilled women representing the majority of household employees. In response to these pressing needs the CareNet project will design, develop and pilot learning paths and resources based on cooperative learning between care workers and care recipients to promote improved quality of care and quality of life through the acquisition of care related digital competences. In addition, to answer specific needs, learning modules for individual learning, addressing ICT competences for employability and self-development (care workers) and ICT competences for active ageing (older people) will be created. In this way the project will contribute to: the identified needs for professionalization of care workers; increased access to learning opportunities; personal development of care workers; overcoming the isolation of both care workers and older people by promoting social enterprise, active citizenship and active ageing.

For this reason, the project seeks to design, develop and pilot:

•  
• learning paths and resources based on cooperative learning between care workers and care recipients
• to promote improved quality of care and quality of life through the acquisition of care related digital competences.
• In addition, to answer specific needs, learning modules for individual learning, addressing employability and self-development of ICT competences for care workers and active ageing ICT competences for elders, will be provided and piloted.

The project will contribute to:

• professionalization;
• increased access to learning opportunities;
• personal development of care workers;
• overcoming the isolation of care workers and elders by promoting active citizenship and active ageing.

Details of on the project can be found at the project website: http://www.carenetproject.eu/

Social networks play an essential role in learning environments as a key channel for knowledge sharing and students’ support. In distributed learning communities, knowledge sharing does not occur as spontaneously as when a working group shares the same physical space; knowledge sharing depends even more on student informal connections. In this study we analyse two distributed learning communities’ social networks in order to understand how characteristics of the social structure can enhance students’ success and performance. We used a monitoring system for social network data gathering. Results from correlation analyses showed that students’ social network characteristics are related to their performance.