The Second Coming

The journey from Web 2.0 to Learning 2.0

Your can be forgiven for asking yourself what happened to Web 1.0 and for wondering if
you had missed something while you were busy in the classroom. Acronyms and jargon
are the smoke and mirrors of the computer world so I shall try to avoid all that. I will
begin by giving a simple introduction to Web 2.0 applications followed by a
demonstration of how these applications can be used to transform classroom practice. In
the plenary I will describe the way these new technologies are challenging long held
assumptions about schools, education and learning

What is all the fuss about?

The first person to talk about Web 2.0 was Tim O’Reilly in 2001 and he is worth
following up if you want the history (http://www.oreilly.com/). Since then Web 2.0 seems to
have become a catch all to describe any new example of social software which drops the
‘e’ ( Frappr, Bubblr, Scribd etc). There are even people talking about the arrival of web
3.0 and 4.0.

Let’s leave the futurists to conjecture and meanwhile concentrate on the here and now.
Clearly people are doing things on the internet which they weren’t doing four years ago.
The Music industry has already been turned upside down; journalists are now competing
with Blogs and You Tube. TV News stations are inviting viewers to post their own video
stories and the next generation is busy expressing themselves and building social network
in a way most adults cannot comprehend.

Web 2.0 applications are incredibly popular with the 14 to 25 age group and they have
participation rates and levels of engagement which advertisers and media moguls would
die for. They may be free to users but they fetch a handsome price on the open market.
MySpace has over 100 million users and was bought by Rupert Murdoch for $580
million; Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion; Yahoo buys Flickr and the owner of
Face Book currently refuses to sell in spite of tempting offers. Don Tapscott the author of
Wikinomics ( an interesting read ) shows how massive numbers of people can participate
in the economy using social software ( eBay is a good example). Tapscott describes the
way companies like Lego and Goldthorpe Mining have jumped onto the Web 2.0
bandwagon and used it to define a new relationship between producers and consumers or
Prosumer to describe the way industry initiates the process of mass customisation. Tom
Friedman in ‘The World is Flat’ maybe not be talking about Web 2.0 but he does describe
how the web has changed the way we behave when he says.. ‘It ( the internet) has
created a global platform that allowed more people to plug and play, collaborate and
compete, share knowledge and share work, than anything we have ever seen in the
history of the world’.

So can schools and teachers use Web 2.0 and social software?. Is it relevant to
education?. Are we missing out?. Is Learning 2.0 any different from what we have
always done?. Have we been here before?. This article takes a look at some popular
Web 2.0 applications and attempts to show how these can be used to support C Learning
as opposed to E Learning; what I call social learning where the emphasis is on
cooperation, communication, collaborative and creativity, rather than the transmission of
content and drill and practice exercises.

Spot the difference. Web 1 v Web 2

Web 1.0, or the web that you and I knew so well is basically all about publishing and
browsing; its about pushing out content to whoever happens to be looking. In the world
of Web 1.0 only as a few of us became authors and we relied on the web master to run the
show. Nothing wrong in this but this does serve to illustrate one of the key differences;
in Web 1.0 there was no relationship between authors and readers and certainly no
connection between people who used the same site. In Web 2.0 this is turned on its head
and we all become authors, editors, publishers and reviewers; the News is Us, WE make
the News ( no wonder Murdoch wanted to buy MySpace, he gets us for free). Witness
the way people used the blogs to follow the story of the Virginia Tech massacre. What’s
more in Web 2.0 we know who our readers are, we can build a relationship with them
through our Blog. Similarly the readers can get in touch with each other. In Web 2.0
instead of building websites we are building powerful social networks – the web is no
longer just about content distribution but about content creation by Us on a scale we
could never imagine. Where Web 1.0 was about hierarchies, Web 2.0 is about democracy
and engagement because the barriers to publishing and responding are no longer there.

As an educationalist you will also be picking up on the sub text and drawing parallels
between the way Web 2.0 works and what we have always recognized as good education
practice – learner centre discussions, learning networks, learner constructing knowledge
etc ( take a look at the work done by Scardamalia and Bereiter, Jim Hewitt and G
Salmon). More about this later when I look at some examples of Web 2.0 applications.
Meanwhile Web 1.0 is beginning to look more like dull old Mr Chips, standing there and
delivering all that he knows, albeit with charm and grace.

Some Examples of Web 2.0

The most obvious example is to talk about Blogs, after all they represent everything we
have said about Web 2.0. Blogs make you the publisher, editor, reviewer of your own
magazine. Your readers can subscribe ( using RSS – more about this later). A Blog is
Web 2.0 because it puts you in touch with your readers and other like minded bloggers
and so opens up the possibility of you managing your own network. Technorati.com is a
web site where you can search for Bloggers. As an aside any good Learning Platform is
essentially giving you an easy to manage Blog and conversely a Blog is a mini learning
platform – take a look at Kathy Cassidy talking on You Tube @
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZ8VAef8QM4 )
she regularly uses Blogs ( and Wikis) with her grade one class.

Having said all this, I think Blogs are not the best example to use because to understand
Web 2.0 you need to have a certain attitude and perception about the technology rather
than an understanding how to use the applications. Nothing illustrates this better than
Flickr.
Learning 2.0 with Flickr
Most people are familiar with Flickr, the photo sharing site and use it to share their
photos with family and friends. They are using it as a free website albeit with really cool
uploading tools so the technology is pretty well invisible. What most people don’t realize
is that Flickr has several powerful Web 2.0 features. For example you can use Flickr to
find other people who take photos like you; what’s more you can subscribe to those
Flickr users and receive updates whenever they add a new photo – you have a
relationship with them defined by you. You can also use Flickr to carefully control who
sees your photo collection – making them public speaks for itself but you can restrict
access to chosen friends, family. With Flickr you hold the publishing rights.
Another Web 2.0 feature is Flickr’s use of Folksonomies – an anathema to any librarian
but a fact of life with Web 2.0 and strangely it seems to work. What happens is this –
when you upload a photo you can use whatever tag or category you like – Hong Kong,
Weather, Landscape, Hello Kitty etc. The best bit is that you can then find other people
who have used the same tag and see their photos – look at their galleries and find your
photo soul mate. This may seem like anarchy to someone brought up to find information
using the Dewey system but, as James Sureweki says in Wisdom of the Crowds, the sum
total of the knowledge of the many is more accurate than the knowledge of the few. In
other word Folksonomies represent the wisdom of the many. The best example of this is
Wikipedia which by all accounts is as accurate as Encyclopedia Britannica.

So what Defines Web 2.0?

Folksonomies, finding people who have same interests as you and building social
networks and social capital, is what defines Web 2.0. In Web 1.0 you just build content.
Understand this and you will recognize a Web 2.0 application whatever it is called. This
is what I mean when I say that Web 2.0 is about an attitude of mind. You can give two
people Flickr, one will use it as a Web 1.0 website and the other will use it to create a
network of like minded photographers who can share and discuss their collections and
techniques. Interestingly the Netgener’s don’t always get it either. While they are very
fluent in using the technology and creating their digital presence in Face Book, MySpace
or Bebo, they often do not understand the significance of the security settings and so
leave themselves wide open to predators and malingerers.
Lastly there is transparency about the way we interact with Web 2.0 applications – the
technology does not get in the way of what we want to do – there are no distractions
because it does what it says on the label. Neither do we need any mediation, no need for
a technician to configure our PC and we can access our work from any machine. This is
because a true Web 2.0 applications is all run from the server; all we need is to have is the
connectivity. No need to pay for or read tomb like training manuals – it’s usually enough
to ring a friend. All this has major implications for the teaching of ICT Capability and
ICT Skills. Put simply the question is – What is the point?

There is one more example which illustrates the characteristics and benefits of Web 2.0.
These are the applications which support social book marking and the best known ones
are Del.icio.us and Furl. I will use Furl but they all do roughly the same things and it
goes without saying that it is best not to get too religious in world of Web 2.0; use
whatever seems appropriate at the time – they will all give you the same tools so it is just
a question of what you are comfortable with.

Social Book Marking with Furl

There is nothing new about bookmaking your favourite web sites but imagine what you
could do if you it was possible to share your bookmarks and, even better, find people who
bookmark sites like yours and explore their library of favourites. This is all possible in
the world of social bookmarking and two most popular Web 2.0 solutions are del.icio.us
and Furl.
I use Furl to create a public library of my favourite Web 2.0 applications (see
http://www.furl.net/members/woodheadp ) where colleagues, or whoever else I invite,
can then see my library of favourites. To make things easier you can subscribe ( using
RSS) to all the sites in my library or one of the topics. Subscription or RSS means you
get alerts next time I add a new site. If you visit my archive you will see, not
surprisingly, that I have used my own Folksonomy to categorized the sites. I find
Folksonomies useful for another reason; when I search other people’s archives they tell
me a lot about that person’s interests. Del.icio.us uses Tag Clouds which, I think, are an
even better way of representing the categories. I have gone one stage further and made
published my archive using a widget from Scrollbox. This allows me to embed selected
topics into a web page or learning platform home page so readers can see not just the
URL, but also the title and the header. You can use any number of free widgits ( see me
Furl archive for more) to create a scrolling displays from your RSS feeds.

Using Social Bookmarking in the Classroom. Information Literacy and the

Learner’s Democratic Front
The obvious place to start is to replace those web site in inventories with a class or topic
Furl account ( del.icio.us would do just as well). Make sure all the students have access
to the account and you’ve suddenly saved yourself a lot of work keeping the list up to
date and distributing it to all your students. Get students to subscribe via RSS and they
will automatically be informed of new additions. You could share the ownership with a
colleague and so combine your collections instantly for no extra effort. Suddenly you
have created a dynamic library of very useful resources which is accessible 24/7.

As you will have guessed this is only the beginning. The next step is a small one
technically but a great leap educationally – you begin to let go and give your students
joint ownership of the archive/ library so they can add sites with comments and
justifications. This way you are sharing the responsibility for maintaining the library –
your students are learning from each other. This is not just about giving them another
chore or task; you are also giving your students the chance to develop and apply their
Information Literacy skills. Each time they add a site they have to categorise, justify,
comment etc and the audience is their peers. You can be cute and create a protocol which
will identify individual users and the Furl statistics will tell everyone whose sites are the
most used. Sounds like some good formative assessment – Wisdom of the Crowds?
At the same time you are sending out a strong message about the value of peer to peer
learning; a big shift from the traditional authoritarian approach where the teacher was the
only publisher and distributor. It is a good example of how Web 2.0 is democratizing the
learning process as it removes the barriers that have hitherto kept teachers and learners
apart. You will see this pattern emerging whenever you start using Web 2.0 applications.
Zoho is a good example (http://www.zoho.com/ ) with its wide range of social versions of
Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Wikis etc. Of course it is all about attitude, by itself Web 2.0 is
no different but in the hands of a teacher who believes in student centered learning and
peer to peer networking, it is a revolution and allows us to put into practice what we
struggled to do before the web arrived ( remember the Humanities Curriculum Project of
the 70’s?). The difference now is that your students are the publishers and editors, they
now have access to an authentic audience, not just of their peers but anyone else who you
have invited into the discussion/ inquiry/ information sharing activity.

Wikis and RSS Feeds. The Constructivists Dream Ticket

Wikis, at their simplest level, are a way of giving a group of people concurrent editor
rights over the same document. It’s the Web 2.0 apps which is specifically designed to
support group work and collaboration. For example you want your students to work in
teams to write up their field work experiences; each team is responsible for publishing a
single article which represents their sum total of their work. Without a Wiki this becomes
an administrative nightmare and ultimately succumbs to the inevitable group dynamic of
workers versus observers, and a huge question mark over who actually did what. Wikis
solve all those problems and there are lots of sites to chose from, but start with a
WetPaint Wiki (http://www.wetpaint.com/ ).

Create the Field Trip Wiki, give the students joint editorial rights and sit back. The Wiki
will plot who has made additions/ changes/ deletions; record the remarks of each
contributor and so forth. Other team members could be given viewing rights only so they
can monitor each others progress ( sense of competition). Other ideas could be to create
a class/ topic dictionary or encyclopedia – done by the students, of course. The accuracy
of the entries grows as their understanding develops, just what we thought knowledge
construction was all about. Suddenly all the theory surrounding the constructivist
approach to learning becomes a reality.

RSS feeds. What I describe as the glue which holds together the Web 2.0 world.
Whenever you visit a web page look out for this icon -
Without going into the detail, the principle of the RSS ( another one is Atom Feed) is
open up a subscription to the content of that web page. Anytime new content is added the
RSS sends you notification and all you have to do is click on that RSS feed in your IE7 or
Firefox browser. This will open up the latest version of the page and saves you the bother
of going directly to the page. With so much information on the web, managing it is
problematic; RSS feeds bring the information you want to your browser. So, for
example, you can use RSS feeds to be kept informed about any changes in sites like
Flickr, Furl or a Wiki. Anytime anyone adds something new like a photos, edits the
Wiki or add a new, you get an alert. You don’t have to go clicking all over the web to see
what’s been happening, instead wait for the RSS link to go bold and you know something
new has arrived.

There is a whole lot more you can do with RSS feeds like display the content in a
scrolling window so students can see the news being published as it happens. There is an
example of this the ESF’s Learning Platform
(https://clc.esf.edu.hk/GroupHomepage.asp?GroupId=1)
Log on with the guest account ( gueste1 and password as guest) scroll down to the bottom
of the Home Page where there is a small window which displays the content of an RSS
feed to the Web 2.0 Topic in my Furl Archive.

What else if out there?

The list grows all the time but try this link to a compendium site
(http://web2.econsultant.com/ ).
Regard them as radioactive isotopes of the web – some will have a short half life and fade
rapidly, others will have much greater penetrating power and become households names
for example eBay and Skype. A couple worth mentioning some serious, others just for
fun.

Yackpack
Google Documents
43 Things
Blubbr
Snap
Last.fm
Slideshare
Zoho
Plaxo
Mysay
Scribd

Summary
Technology has never been neutral and its adoption is often a reflection of our
educational values and belief. For examples if we believe that students need to be taught
by us, then we prefer to use technology to distribute resources and assess our students
progress. If we believe that student learn from each other then we use technology to
support collaboration and knowledge construction. At same time technology has always
had a subversive influence on education because it raises questions about our current
practice. Teachers resistance to technology is less to do with technical issues and more to
do with whether the technology fits in to their personal professional beliefs about how
students learn.

Web 2.0 is no exception, and seriously questions traditional structures and processes
which have defined learning for the last 100 years but are still with us. To sum I want to
raise some of the questions which we need to address if we are not to create a new digital
divide between the education we offer in our schools and the way young people are
learning for themselves.

• With Web 2.0 and ubiquitous access to the web, we can no longer equate learning
with schooling; in effect schools hegemony over learning is under threat. The
idea that learning – at least in a secondary school – only happens at a certain time,
in a classroom and is delivered by the teacher, is no longer tenable.

• How we will evaluate the quality of teaching and learning if significant parts of it
are taking place outside the school day and beyond the school campus.

• What will we do when we no longer need to deliver the content because the
students can Google it.? There are over 2.7 billion searches run on Google every
month; before Google who was answering these questions?.

• What will we do then the knowledge and expertise no longer resides within the
school and classroom?

• What will we do when students reject our offered curriculum in favour of one
they put together themselves from a collection of web based education centres
around the world?

• What will we do when the students have already personalized their learning using
Blogs, Wikis, RSS feeds and social bookmarking.

• What will we mean by value added when students are capable of managing their
own feedback. For example a Year 7 student writes an essay about one of her Jane
Austen set readings. Before she submits the work to her teacher she submits it for
peer assessment on fanfiction. Within 24 hours she receives constructive
feedback from five other Jane Austen fans and she improves her essay

Draft . July 2007

Peter Woodhead
ICT Adviser
ESF