During the last three decades, European countries have invested large amounts of money in providing schools and higher education institutions with digital technologies. These investments were made hoping that they would enhance digital literacy and e-skills in Europe’s young people. In fact, digital competence was listed as one of the eight key competences for lifelong learning (European Council, 2006). Since the turn of the century, considerable achievements in implementing ICT in educational setting have been made, although large implementation gaps within and between countries remain (Education, Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency, 2011). The use of digital technologies in formal and non-formal educational contexts has shown some interesting developments.

One of these developments is the increased use of digital videos (Bartolomé, 2003). Videos have the advantage of demonstrating procedural knowledge vis-à-vis information that only presents declarative knowledge. Creation and access of digital videos has greatly been facilitated by advances in technology. Internet platforms like YouTube or Khan Academy offer a wide variety of videos that help users to understand and solve almost any problem that can be thought of. But the use of videos has also become more prominent in formal education (Vincent, 2015). Videos are being used in MOOCs, and their implementation in traditional learning management platforms like MOODLE has been made much easier (Mackley, 2015). Videos can be made open educational resources; there are a number of organisations which offer educational videos for free (e.g. BBC Active, http://www.bbcactivevideoforlearning.com/ ).

In their presentation  “The application of videos in scientific diffusion and their reuse as open educational resources” Sergio Fernando Tavares from the Universidade Federal do Paraná (Brasil) and his colleagues focus on the dissemination of scientific knowledge. From their point of view, short videos which they call video posters, are especially apt for this job. They will explain how this kind of videos can be created and then used to make scientific knowledge available to the public. In particular, they will demonstrate how their video posters were used at two scientific events.

The use of videos is also of concern in the presentation “Using Open Video Annotations (OVA) in evaluating practicum results” by Antonio Bartolomé from Barcelona university and his colleagues from Málaga University (Spain). However, in Open Video Annotation,  the focus is not on the content of a specific video, but on the way students interact with the video (Hosak, 2010). Interaction is possible by leaving comments or links to other sources on the video. These annotations can also be seen by peers and instructors and can thus be made the object of different forms of assessment. Students’ annotations can be assessed using quantitative as well as qualitative criteria. The authors will explain the assessment procedure and report results on the reliability and validity of the instrument.

The contribution of Karl Steffens from Cologne University and his colleague Antonio Bartolomé “Family cultures and the use of digital technologies” will focus on a phenomenon that almost seems to be a paradox. PISA studies have shown that there seems to be an inversed U-shaped relationship between ICT-use and PISA results (OECD, 2011). This is not to say that there is a causal relationship between ICT-use and scholastic achievement. As the presenting author has shown in a prior publication, ICT-use and scholastic achievement seem to be dependent on what Bourdieu called the cultural capital of a family (Steffens, 2014). The authors assume that family culture might be the decisive factor. In order to test this assumption, they have analysed a large data set which was provided by the Spanish Ministry of Education on the participation of Spanish families in school.

Bartolomé, A. (2003). Vídeo digital. Comunicar, 21, 39-47. (http://goo.gl/MDcYOt ) (29-04-2014). European Council (2006). Recommendation of the European Parliament and of the Council of 18 December 2006 on key competences for lifelong learning http://eurlex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:L:2006:394:0010:0018:en:PDF Education, Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency (2011). Key Data on Learning and Innovation through ICT at School in Europe 2011. Brussels: EACEA. Hosack, B. (2010). VideoANT: Extending Online Video Annotation Beyond Content Delivery. TechTrends, 54, 3, 45-49. Mackley, D. (2015). Moodle and the 3E Framework. https://hml.yorksj.ac.uk/Play/7933 OECD (2011) PISA 2009 Results. Students on Line: digital technologies and performance (vol. VI). Paris: OECD. Steffens, K. (2014). ICT Use and Achievement in Three European Countries: what does PISA tell us? European Educational Research Journal, 13 (5), 553-562. Vincent, P. (2015). 10 ways to use video in your teaching. http://blog.yorksj.ac.uk/moodle/2015/10/16/10-ways-to-use-video-in-your-teaching/