Thoughts on: A new wave of innovation for teaching and learning? (Alexander, 2006)
October 17, 2007
Alexander, B. (2006). Web 2.0: A New Wave of Innovation for Teaching and Learning? EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 41, no. 2 (March/April 2006): 32–44. Available athttp://www.educause.edu/apps/er/erm06/erm0621.asp?bhcp=1
Major points:
The web has been highly social since it began (listservs, Usenet groups, discussion software, groupware etc)
Web 2.0 breaks “away from the notion of the Web as book, they are predicated on microcontent. Blogs are about posts, not pages. Wikis are streams of conversation, revision, amendment and truncation.”
“Like social software, microcontent has been around for a while. Banner ads, for example, are often imported by one site from another directory. Collaboratively designed web pages sometimes aggregate content created by different teams over a staggered timeline”
“Openness remains a hallmark of this emergent movement, both ideologically and technologically”
“Openness and microcontent combine into a larger conceptual strand of Web 2.0, one that sees users as playing more of a foundational role in information architecture” (tagging)
“How can social bookmarking play a role in higher education?… First, they act as an “outboard memory”, a location to store links that might be lost to time, scattered across different browser bookmark settings or distributed in e-mails, printouts and Web links.
Second, finding people with related interests can magnify one’s work by learning from others or by leading to new collaborations. Third, the practice of user-created tagging can offer new perspectives on one’s research, as clusters of tags reveal patterns (or absences) not immediately visible by examining one of several URLs.
Fourth, the ability to create multi-authored bookmark pages can be useful for team projects, as each member can upload resources discovered, no matter their location or timing. Tagging can then surface individual perspectives within the collective. Fifth, following a bookmark site gives insights into the owner’s (or owners’) research, which could play well in a classroom setting as an instructor tracks students’ progress. Students, in turn, can learn from their professor’s discoveries. ”
Wikis, blogging and RSS are good. (He says more but you surely know this stuff by now 
The reverse chronological nature of Web 2.0 is particularly good for queries on current events.
Potential issues – copyright, network security when hosted on local networks, stability/longevity of service providers, preservation of useful pieces of microcontent, corporate buy-ups
Some interesting ideas in this one, much more based in what is happening rather than the hype of what might come.
Entry Filed under: 915, Social Web, computer mediated communication, e-learning, eLearning, multimedia, technology, web 2.0. .
2 Comments Add your own
Leave a comment
Some HTML allowed:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>
Trackback this post | Subscribe to the comments via RSS Feed
1.
jdgypton | November 8th, 2007 at 4:16 am
Thanks for the article link and your thoughts in the post. I’m in the process of implementing several 2.0 technologies in my high school history and government courses, and thus far what I’ve rolled out has been well-received by students. I’ve already gotten a lot of mileage out of class wikis, and RSS feeds — for those students who take the time to bookmark the properly — are great.
I need to work on the social bookmarking side of things, though, too — but making time to teach my students how and why is difficult. All the potential is often blunted by the reality of the day-to-day grind.
What are your thoughts on that?
jdg
2.
colinsimpson | November 27th, 2007 at 2:54 pm
Yeah, there is certainly a time element that isn’t always considered when people talk about these tools.
The benefits of the social bookmarking tools would seem to outweigh the startup issues though – particularly if you can get your students excited about discovering and investigating new resources.
Whether you have to do that by making it an assessment item or by introducing some kind of game elements to it – some kind of treasure hunt or most-links competition?
If you get each student to create their own account (assuming you’re using delicious), the for:yourname tagging system is a good way to track who’s adding what.