(Warning, this is a long post, over 2,500 words. Than again, this should compensate for several smaller posts, and I needed the space to draw my thoughts together.)
Web 2.0 is probably one of the most abused terms in the past five years. And because of all this abuse, probably also one of the least understood. Any discussion about web 2.0 should therefore start with going back to the origin. Web 2.0 was introduced in 2004 by Tim O'Reilly (2005) in order to describe a paradigm shift that was going on in the world wide web. In his article O'Reilly describes seven 'design principles' in order to make the shift clear.
These design principles, and some keywords to describe them, are:
1. The web as platform: services, participation, network effects (a service gets better the more people use it), users add value.
2. Harnessing collective intelligence: connections, links, user engagement, collect data and compute on them in order to improve services further, wikipedia - a radical experiment in trust, tags and folksonomies, RSS, permalinks, blogs as conversations.
3. Data is the next Intel inside: user generated data (Amazon recommendations), mash-ups.
4. End of the software release cycle: release early / release often, perpetual beta, user feedback, users treated as co-developers.
5. Lightweight programming models: loosely coupled systems, re-use of data, APIs, hackable, remixable.
6. Software above the level of a single device: iTunes as store, as music management program, as feeder of iPods.
7. Rich user experiences: the rise of web applications as good or better than stand alone software (GMail)
Four years later O'Reilly and Batelle (2009) published a follow-up paper: Web Squared, where the 2 from 2.0 has now been promoted to an exponent. This meme has not (yet) caught on. More importantly, the follow-up paper shows how the principles described in 2005 are still at work an at an accelerating pace. More and more people are creating more and more data, by participating in social networks, by location data from their smartphones &c., and businesses that can structure and compute on these data, and put them to good use thrive.
The reason I start out with these two readings is that there is much more to the term web 2.0 than social media alone. And there is more to social media than meets the eye. Take a blog, for example. On the face of it, it enables a user to easily create web content, without having to know any HTML. The blog becomes more interesting when it uses permalinks to refer to other blogs and becomes now part of a conversation. Below the hood, something even more intriguing is going on: through the RSS feed of the blog, search engines can almost real-time index this ongoing discussion, computation on those indexes can detect trends.
Also, I think it is important to note that in the principles mentioned above there is nothing that relates directly to learning (although the Websquared paper uses the metaphor of the web itself as a learning entity, we, the users, are teaching it by feeding it ever more data). The design principles are at its most powerful at web scale. Most learning takes place at a very small scale. Compare for instance the IDEL course where blogs are mainly used for sustaining a dialog between tutor(s) and student.
Against that background, I started reading the 2009 JISC Report, Higher Education in a Web 2.0 world. The report suffers from a number of misconceptions. The first is that it assumes that there is something to the whole net generation discussion, whereas we have seen that this is over generalizing. The second misconception is that it equates web 2.0 and the social web. The third misconception is even hilarious: "Decisions on whether or not to implement Web 2.0 technologies are, however, the responsibility of each institution individually having regard to its particular ethos and circumstances." (p. 31) Sorry, but that is not how it works. Those technologies are out there, our students are using them, and even 11-16 year old students know how to circumvent use restrictions by schools (Clark et al., 2009).
Another annoying thing in the JISC report is the frequent mentioning of something called e-pedagogy, defined as "learning with and / or through technology". Is that all there is? Okay, they sense that the affordances of new technologies call for thinking about new educational approaches. And there is a hint to constructivism on p. 36.
And to end positively, there is at least one web 2.0 characteristic that found its way in the report, we find it on p. 38: "The involvement of students in the development of tools for learning and teaching cannot be achieved by fiat and immediately; rather it is a position to be developed over time. However, we believe that the resulting outcomes for tutors, students and HE overall stand to be highly positive and rewarding." This echoes O'Reilly's idea of users as co-developers.
The interesting question is of course whether students and teachers would be comfortable with a more flat hierarchy. We discussed the ECAR studies during the net generation week that show that most students are asking for good old f2f teaching. But who knows, maybe British students are different. So what a joy to find a report by the National Union of Students (NUS) on their perspective on technology, just published last month (HEFCE 2010).
At least style-wise, the NUS report echoes the JISC (2009) report with its numbered paragraphs. The approach has been a bit different though, in that they explicitly used Facebook and Twitter in their methodology. Of course there is the expected rant that teachers are lacking technology skills. On the other hand, the students themselves also ask for skills training, for instance in searching, although a survey they undertook showed that 88.6 percent regarded themselves a 'effective online searchers'. (p. 4) The biggest surprise we see in paragraph 102: "Yet students with a working understanding of ICT may have a transformative effect on teaching practices, no longer being passive, but actively involved, and educating lecturers en route." (p. 28) Even students can see themselves in a role as co-developers.
Of course, the space I devoted to these two 50+ pages reports is too limited to do them justice. To me, they both show that there is a huge uncertainty - among students, teachers, and administrators - when it comes to web 2.0, or even more limited, the social web, and its possible implications for (e-) learning.
Then again, this whole idea of students as co-developers is already happening, for instance in the Open Wetware (
http://openwetware.org/wiki/Courses) project, a community of bio-engineers:
"As more and more people got on, it became apparent that the collaboration could benefit other endeavors, such as classes. Instead of making do with a static Web page posted by a professor, students began to create dynamically evolving class sites where they could post lab results, ask questions, discuss the answers and even write collaborative essays. "And it all stayed on the site, where it made the class better for next year," says Shetty, who has built an OpenWetWare template for creating such class sites." (Waldrop, 2008)
It should also be noted that there is another web 2.0 principle at work here: re-use of data.
On to the other readings. Ravenscroft (2009) starts out with the now familiar misconception that web 2.0 equals social software, but asks the right question:"What are the implications for learning?" (p.1) Skipping the article summaries there seem to be some interesting references to earlier work of Ravenscroft hinting at learning design that I will want to follow up on. Ravenscroft's comments on the tension between 'highly structured' learning / teaching and the 'more collaborative, volatile and anarchic nature of the social web' (p. 5) echo the smooth / striated distinction from Bayne in earlier weeks. Since that tension interests me, I chose two articles in the special issue to delve more into that.
Clark et al. (2009) show how young (11 - 16 yo) learners and their teachers are struggling with the invasion of new technologies and how these new technologies are blurring distinctions / crossing lines between the young people's social environments and the school environment. With the growth of the mobile web, these tensions will only become stronger. The sloppy use of data in the article (table 2, p. 61, where the total percentages cannot adequately be traced back to the constituent samples) did not invite me to go much deeper into this article. I have reported my issues with table 2 to the lead author, Wilma Clark.
The Trentin (2009) article is a prime example of striating an originally smooth tool, the wiki. The good thing about the article is that it also introduces some 'rules for distributed writing' (p. 45), although introducing these rules in itself already implies a structuring of an environment that is intrinsically anarchic. On the other hand, even Wikipedia has developed guidelines for its contributors (see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Contents/Policies_and_guideli).
This is also in sharp contrast to the activity for this week where Bayne has chosen for an almost completely smooth approach in hardly offering any guidance or feedback in wikifying David Silver's article. I added some text, I added some links, I created a page for suggested readings, I embedded a video, and I added a comment in order to see whether we can have some 'meta' discussion on where the group wants the wiki to go. But as of November 18, there is not much progress in this area.
Back to Trentin. The methodology he describes for arriving at grades seems to me quite a burden for teachers, although one could choose to offload some of the work to students. Interestingly enough, peer assessment seems to correlate well with more objective measurements of activity (p. 48) which would have been an interesting thing for follow-up research. Instead, Trentin wants to build a wiki that collects the data he needs for his grading methodology. Well, good luck to him with that striated approach.
From wiki's to hypertext is but a short distance, so on to the final reading for these weeks, Landow (2006), Hypertext 3.0, where the 3.0 refers to the third edition of the book. Some observations:
- The book obviously evolved as hypertext, unfortunately, we have to do with the linear printed text (and a scanned image at that).
- I searched the Victorian Web (http://www.victorianweb.org/) for the hypertext version, but no. Obviously the author is not very much into Open Access yet, and boy, did that website look Web 1.0ish. Converting the thing to a wiki might make more sense.
- Deja vu. In week 4 and 5 we had Gee (2003) the linguist that seemed to be developing his own learning theory based on his experiences with a particular computer game. Now we have a literature professor sharing his pedagogical insights gained from working with his students on hypertext. As with Gee, it is not clear how these experiences / insights might be generalized, how they might fit in an overarching pedagogical framework.
- There's Landow's remark on p. 279 about hypertext 'providing the means of integrating subject materials of a single course with other courses.' I noticed that the Holyrood PBWiki is two parts, for two different courses. Alas, I did not have access to the wiki of the other course (Digital Futures), but I guess that was a deliberate design decision.
- On p. 281 we find the beautiful word 'extended' again. Yes!
Landow's discussion also echoes what we see in the Open Wetware project mentioned earlier (Waldrop, 2008). Material is created by students and becomes available as a resource for future students (p. 285). I also love the way how Landow describes how he redesigned his assignments in order to show students the advantages of hypertext (p. 286). Many more good points in this text, I truly enjoyed it.
Words that keep on recurring are extension and design. From our web 2.0 discussion we might add re-use and students as co-creators. I've also mentioned the smooth / striated distinction a few times.
With regard to that last distinction there's another interesting experience that I mentioned on the WebCT discussion board for these weeks:
"Comparing week 6/7 with week 8/9 (so far), I think what we see is what I hereby would like to dub as the WYGIWYE design principle: what you get is what you expect.
Week 6/7 might be said to be 'over designed', where week 8/9 looks rather 'under designed'. Lots and lots of activities and literature in week 6/7 plus a tutor actively steering the discussion board. Result 218 messages on the db for those weeks. So far we have 21 messages on the db for week 8/9.
So one learning outcome for me is that a design needs to find a balance, especially when it comes to what you expect your students to do."
(IDEL WebCT Discussion Board, November 12, 2010)
The observation led mostly to students expressing their relieve about the 'breather' they got. There's was also the remark by Bo Causer that it must be frustrating for the IDEL team to 'teach teachers'. To which Nigel Mehdi replied that it is the recursive element here that fascinates him. Exactly, I am learning as much from using the many digital environments set up for us by the IDEL team, and the way they where set up by them, and the way they are being 'led' by the tutors, as from the literature.
The experience also sheds yet another light on the smooth / striated distinction. However smooth you set up / design a learning experience, your students will expect some structure, some leadership, some expectations (expect expectations? can you say that? well I hope it is clear what I am hinting at), or ... some striation. Again it is not either / or, it's all about balancing a design.
Clark, W. et al. (2009), Beyond Web 2.0: mapping the technology landscapes of young learners, Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 25, 56-69
Gee, J. P. (2003). Learning and Identity: What does it mean to be half-elf? In What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy (pp. 51-71). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan
Landow, G (2006) Hypertext 3.0: Critical Theory and New Media in a Global Era (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press), extracts: 278-291 and 302-309
Ravenscroft, A. (2009), Social software,Web 2.0 and learning: status and
implications of an evolving paradigm, Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 25, 1-5
Trentin, G. (2009), Using a wiki to evaluate individual contribution to a collaborative learning project, Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 25, 43-55
