October 23, 2006
What "Web 2.0" Can Teach Professors
During a speech today at the League for Innovation’s Conference on Information Technology, held here in Charlotte, N.C., Ellen Wagner took her audience on a guided tour of “Web 2.0” — a term applied to a broad range of Web sites that encourage interaction and collaborative work. Ms. Wagner, the senior director of worldwide-learning solutions at Adobe Systems, ran through a list of Web stalwarts (like the Encyclopaedia Britannica’s online edition) and pointed out that they’d been trumped by sites that encourage users to create their own content (like Wikipedia, the popular open-source encyclopedia).
Professors can learn a lot from Web 2.0 enterprises like Digg, the technology-news aggregator, and Second Life, the fast-growing virtual world, Ms. Wagner said. By connecting users to online communities, she said, those services provide more memorable learning experiences than students may get from more-entrenched, less-interactive technologies.
Web 2.0 may be a hot property among techies, but academics, it seems, have been a bit slower to embrace user-generated content. When Ms. Wagner sought attendees who regularly read Wikipedia, the popular open source, only a few people raised their hands to plead guilty. And when she asked if anyone in the audience had gone so far as to edit articles on the Web site, no hands went up at all. —Brock Read
Comments
Commenting is closed for this article.
Previous: How to Check on Cheating
Next: Everybody's an Expert
I have done two presentations recently on the same topic to audiences of K12 teachers and found the same results.
They are aware of social networking sites (MySpace etc.) but only in a superficial-media coverage-of-the-evils way. Sites that require an account to view (Facebook, Second Life) are unknown territories.
Though I believe there are some educational uses of some of these sites, I’m more concerned that teachers have very little knowledge about how their students are using these sites on their own.
As in earlier decades, with television, film, popular literature and the Internet, I feel that teachers need to at least be able to guide students to the better material available and instruct them on wise use of these tools.
http://devel2.njit.edu/serendipity/index.php?/archives/163-Entering-the-Heart-of-Darkness-at-NJAET.html
— Ken Ronkowitz Oct 24, 01:43 PM #
While the group of professors using open-source applications does not constitute a majority by all means, I want to ‘come to the rescue of our profession’.
Over 60 educational institutions are conducting research and classes in ‘Second Life’ (SL), the 3D virtual community started by San Francisco based Linden Lab. I am presently holding part of my class on ‘Visionary Concepts in Motion Arts’ in Second Life. I have a daily exchange with fellow educators and Linden Lab’s Education Manager ‘Pathfinder’, communicating via SL chat, listserv or wikis.
The foray into a virtual environment has been an immersive experience, allowing us instant interaction with students and unaffiliated visitors from Argentina, England, Australia to name a few. The immediacy of building models in a 3D world, of testing behavior scripts in real-time has been an enrichment to our classroom experience.
The open-access environment, editable and reproducible content of wikis, and digital media, the generosity of shared learning is certainly a (welcome) challenge to our notion of ownership and territory.
(Mechthild Schmidt, faculty at NYU/McGhee, Digital Communications and Media)
— Mechthild Schmidt Nov 19, 12:53 AM #