Education 2.0? - Teaching and Learning Research Programme
Education 2.0? - Teaching and Learning Research Programme Education 2.0? - Teaching and Learning Research Programme
ii Socialising the expressive: media design, sharing, and publicationThe capacity for trading and sharing media files, notably music downloads, has stimulated growth in theamateur production of such material. A number of tools have appeared to meet this interest. To some extentthese mirror traditional tools for manipulating digital media, providing ways of splicing, editing, dubbing andso forth. Other tools encourage the mixing of ready-made items taken, as it were, from the shelf. 5 The livelypractice of the ‘web mash-up’ celebrates the potential of taking existing media items and ‘mashing’ themtogether to make a new product, typically accessible through a web browser. Expressive activity with digitalmaterial has become a realistic ambition for users, and the activity has been socialised through the growthof internet outlets that permit sharing, publication or broadcasting. These sites allow the posting of usergeneratedcontent, most famously in silos for video, photographs, sketches, and slideshows. 6iii Socialising the reflective: blogs, social networks, and wikisTraditional outlets for personal reflection include the diary and the notebook. Such resources have beensocialised by web 2.0 technologies in a variety of formats. Perhaps the best known is the ‘blog,’ a web-basedlog or journal in which an author’s postings (text, sound, images, video, or weblinks) become visible onlineto others who can engage with them by posting comments in response to the author’s entries. The socialnetworking sites, famously Facebook and MySpace, can be seen as elaborations of this format into moretightly-knit and manageable communities of reflective users. On these sites, registered users can specifythe ‘friends’ who can access their blog-like web space. They can develop personal identity and cultivaterelationships by posting and exchanging digital material, playing online games, and joining groups that sharecommon interests. The blog tradition is personal and diary-like. The wiki shares a quality of ‘perpetual beta’with the blog but it allows other users an equable right to edit and develop content in a common space. Thusit is well-suited to the collaborative building of specialist knowledge. The best-known version of this idea isWikipedia. 7iv Socialising the exploratory: syndication, recommenders, folksonomiesThe searching and filtering that comprise an individual’s exploratory activity has also been socialised by web2.0 technologies. The increasingly participatory nature of the web challenges the user to keep abreast of everemergingnew material. Syndication involves some portion of a website being made available to users by theirsubscribing to a ‘feed’ that automatically delivers requested material and updates to their browser or somedesktop ‘aggregator’ application. The most prominent example is the podcast, whereby a user may subscribeto or publish a regularly-released digital media file, such as a radio broadcast. Portals exist to help tracethese podcasts. 8 However, exploration also involves discovery. Web 2.0 socialises this by integrating data onselections that users make online. Internet book traders such as Amazon.com will capture the titles that theirindividual users browse. When a user selects a title, the trader can trace the selections of other users who havebrowsed that title and make them visible, thereby creating recommendations. Such coordination of user choicescan also be applied to a user’s personal music files, or to their web browser bookmarks if they are willing tomake them visible to the integrating service.A development of this anonymous sharing arises when users are encouraged to tag internet material that theycreate or find, particularly web-based articles, images, or videos. This activity generates a ‘tag cloud’ that maybe centred on an individual, and thereby express their interests, or on other internet items such as a page,a picture, or a published article, and thereby express its content or concerns. The form of categorising thatemerges from such activity has become known as a ‘folksonomy’ – distinguishing it from the more formal andordered traditions of ‘taxonomy’. There are a wide variety of tools that help users identify and navigate suchdescriptive systems.
Education 2.0?Learning concepts behind web 2.0Any educational practice that concerns the playful, expressive, reflective or exploratory aspects of knowledgebuilding is likely to find web 2.0 tools and services a powerful resource. Moreover, educators can safely assumethat most learners know about them. When directed at learning, web 2.0 impacts on four principal dimensionsof the learner’s experience. Two are broadly social in nature (collaboration and publication) and two are morecognitive (literacies and inquiry).i) Collaboration Web 2.0 services support communication. They allow learners to coordinate their activitiesto various degrees of depth. This can range from the relatively trivial level of participating in anonymousrecommender systems to the more intense level of interpersonal, verbal debate. Web 2.0 may offer educatorsa set of tools to support forms of learning that can be more strongly collaborative and more oriented to thebuilding of classroom communities.ii) Publication We expect to see the work of learners on display in a classroom. The read-and-write characterof web 2.0 supports users in creating original material for publication. Its relatively unbounded space can offer astrong feeling of doing authentic research when students can publish and discuss the products of their study.iii) Literacies Culture stimulates a form of intelligence that is ‘literate’. Schooling cultivates a distinctorientation towards language, to which interactions with writing are crucial. Digital media stretch this tradition byoffering new modes of representation and expression. Even the term ‘literacy’ now has to be stretched to admitother forms of representational fluency than those associated with the printed word. As learners engage withdigital artefacts through web 2.0, so the curriculum must address the challenge of developing their confidencewith new literacies and their increased potential for creativity.iv) Inquiry Web 2.0 technologies offer new ways for learners to conduct personal research. It creates newstructures for organising data, new sources to refer to, new forms of authority, and new tools to interrogate thisrich space of information. All of this has the potential to empower the student as an independent learner. But italso brings challenges to both learner and teacher. Web 2.0 knowledge structures are not navigated with thesame tools or the same ease as more traditional documentary collections. It poses problems of authority andthe ephemeral nature of web ‘knowledge’.Web 2.0 tools appear to strengthen fundamental aspects of learning that may be difficult to stimulate inlearners. There are problems with web 2.0 learning in practice, but these tools do seem to mark a step changein the ways in which learners can interact with and on the web. Alongside business, journalism and medicine, itis therefore perhaps not too fanciful to talk of ‘education 2.0’.9
- Page 4: IntroductionNeil SelwynThe past fiv
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ii Socialising the expressive: media design, sharing, <strong>and</strong> publicationThe capacity for trading <strong>and</strong> sharing media files, notably music downloads, has stimulated growth in theamateur production of such material. A number of tools have appeared to meet this interest. To some extentthese mirror traditional tools for manipulating digital media, providing ways of splicing, editing, dubbing <strong>and</strong>so forth. Other tools encourage the mixing of ready-made items taken, as it were, from the shelf. 5 The livelypractice of the ‘web mash-up’ celebrates the potential of taking existing media items <strong>and</strong> ‘mashing’ themtogether to make a new product, typically accessible through a web browser. Expressive activity with digitalmaterial has become a realistic ambition for users, <strong>and</strong> the activity has been socialised through the growthof internet outlets that permit sharing, publication or broadcasting. These sites allow the posting of usergeneratedcontent, most famously in silos for video, photographs, sketches, <strong>and</strong> slideshows. 6iii Socialising the reflective: blogs, social networks, <strong>and</strong> wikisTraditional outlets for personal reflection include the diary <strong>and</strong> the notebook. Such resources have beensocialised by web <strong>2.0</strong> technologies in a variety of formats. Perhaps the best known is the ‘blog,’ a web-basedlog or journal in which an author’s postings (text, sound, images, video, or weblinks) become visible onlineto others who can engage with them by posting comments in response to the author’s entries. The socialnetworking sites, famously Facebook <strong>and</strong> MySpace, can be seen as elaborations of this format into moretightly-knit <strong>and</strong> manageable communities of reflective users. On these sites, registered users can specifythe ‘friends’ who can access their blog-like web space. They can develop personal identity <strong>and</strong> cultivaterelationships by posting <strong>and</strong> exchanging digital material, playing online games, <strong>and</strong> joining groups that sharecommon interests. The blog tradition is personal <strong>and</strong> diary-like. The wiki shares a quality of ‘perpetual beta’with the blog but it allows other users an equable right to edit <strong>and</strong> develop content in a common space. Thusit is well-suited to the collaborative building of specialist knowledge. The best-known version of this idea isWikipedia. 7iv Socialising the exploratory: syndication, recommenders, folksonomiesThe searching <strong>and</strong> filtering that comprise an individual’s exploratory activity has also been socialised by web<strong>2.0</strong> technologies. The increasingly participatory nature of the web challenges the user to keep abreast of everemergingnew material. Syndication involves some portion of a website being made available to users by theirsubscribing to a ‘feed’ that automatically delivers requested material <strong>and</strong> updates to their browser or somedesktop ‘aggregator’ application. The most prominent example is the podcast, whereby a user may subscribeto or publish a regularly-released digital media file, such as a radio broadcast. Portals exist to help tracethese podcasts. 8 However, exploration also involves discovery. Web <strong>2.0</strong> socialises this by integrating data onselections that users make online. Internet book traders such as Amazon.com will capture the titles that theirindividual users browse. When a user selects a title, the trader can trace the selections of other users who havebrowsed that title <strong>and</strong> make them visible, thereby creating recommendations. Such coordination of user choicescan also be applied to a user’s personal music files, or to their web browser bookmarks if they are willing tomake them visible to the integrating service.A development of this anonymous sharing arises when users are encouraged to tag internet material that theycreate or find, particularly web-based articles, images, or videos. This activity generates a ‘tag cloud’ that maybe centred on an individual, <strong>and</strong> thereby express their interests, or on other internet items such as a page,a picture, or a published article, <strong>and</strong> thereby express its content or concerns. The form of categorising thatemerges from such activity has become known as a ‘folksonomy’ – distinguishing it from the more formal <strong>and</strong>ordered traditions of ‘taxonomy’. There are a wide variety of tools that help users identify <strong>and</strong> navigate suchdescriptive systems.
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