One of the most interesting and telling statements in the article, \u2018Web 2.0 A New Wave of Innovation for Teaching and Learning?\u2019 comes when author Bryan Alexander is discussing the wiki.\u00a0 After describing how the wiki works he says, \u201cThey originally hit the Web in the late 1990s (another sign that Web 2.0 is emergent and historical)\u201d.\u00a0(Alexander, 2006)\u00a0 To refer to something from the late 1990s as \u2018historical\u2019 shows how rapidly web 2.0 is developing and changing.\u00a0 But this rapid development, the thing that makes web 2.0 so interesting and exciting may also be the biggest problem this emergent technology faces.\u00a0 Anderson\u2019s article is specifically intended to discuss the use of Web 2.0 in education, yet Web 2.0 has developed so fast that it has gone beyond the comfort level of many educators.\u00a0 Even teachers who are at ease with the technology are leery of much Web 2.0 content, believing that the openness of Web 2.0, one of its key features, makes it rife with faulty information.\u00a0 Much about Web 2.0 can be discussed and described, with the caveat, \u2018on the one hand…but on the other hand…\u2019\u00a0 Even Anderson, whose intent is to showcase the positive aspects of Web 2.0 appears somewhat cautious of making a categorically positive \u00a0statement and has included a question mark in his title, inviting the reader to decide on the verisimilitude of the title statement.\u00a0 This commentary will look at the Anderson article from the point of view of an educator with limited experience and knowledge of Web 2.0 and point out where some of the problems lie that will prevent this technology from gaining complete acceptance in an education setting.<\/p>\n
As any new technology does, Web 2.0 has developed a user language; phrases, terms and even acronyms that are understood by developers and frequent users but can be problematic for the uninitiated.\u00a0 The article was originally published by Educause, which bills itself as, \u2018a non-profit association whose mission is to advance higher education by promoting the intelligent use of Information Technology\u2019.\u00a0 With this mission statement one can assume that the article was intended for educators, not Information Technology specialists. Yet within the article, Alexander writes in a way that many educators may find confusing. Anderson points out that even the term \u2018social bookmarking\u2019 could be confusing to some users yet then goes on in the article to use such phrases as, \u201cAjax- style pages\u201d,\u00a0(Alexander, 2006) or, \u201cWeb 2.0 can break on silos but thrive in shared services\u201d.\u00a0(Alexander, 2006)\u00a0 One of the most effective ways of separating something from acceptance by the general public is to use a specialized language.<\/p>\n
Since the article is about the educational use of Web 2.0 Anderson discusses how the open structure of social bookmarking sites can be used with respect to research.\u00a0 He envisions the collaborative sharing of research between students and instructors and gives examples of how this could be achieved using Web 2.0 based sites where the open structure allows people to not only read but to change and contribute to a site.\u00a0 As intriguing as this is there are two problems with this notion, both of them related to the open structure of Web 2.0.\u00a0 The problems are the quality of the information that is being shared and the quantity of information available.\u00a0 Of the two, quality is by far the most serious for the student.\u00a0 In the article Alexander talks about one of the best known user controlled sites, Wikipedia, an open structured site which \u201callows users to edit each encyclopaedia entry\u201d.\u00a0(Alexander, 2006)\u00a0 Unfortunately the very openness of a site like Wikipedia and others like it can make the site unreliable.\u00a0 Wikipedia and other open sites allow anyone to add or say anything they want.\u00a0 Its hoped that the nature of these sites, which allows readers not only to contribute but to edit material, will naturally weed out information that is suspect or even wrong, but this is not always the case and many teachers now specifically advise \u00a0students not to use material that has been found on Wikipedia.<\/p>\n
Blogs are another aspect of Web 2.0 that Anderson discusses in terms of their pedagogical possibilities.\u00a0 He describes how, \u201cStudents can search the blogosphere for political commentary, current cultural items, public development s in science, business news, and so on.\u201d\u00a0(Alexander, 2006)\u00a0 While this is true and blogs can allow students and researchers to find and share the most current material in their field, the popularity of blogs has made this a challenge.\u00a0 A recent Google Blog search with the terms, \u2018Digital Literacy\u2019 returned over 350,000 hits, and one with the very general term, \u2018Web 2.0\u2019 returned over 49 million, which leaves one wondering, is this really useful? How many of these will a researcher actually look at and how much time must be invested to do so.\u00a0 Realizing this problem Anderson then goes on to discuss services that can be used to filter search results, which rather than simplifying the process only made the process seem, at least for this reader, \u00a0even more complicated.<\/p>\n
If Web 2.0 is to become \u2018a new wave of innovation for teaching and learning\u2019 its first hurdle will be educators.\u00a0 The problems outlined above will have to be considered and there may have to be a change in direction in how Web 2.0 is presented.\u00a0 Web 2.0 is relatively new, despite Anderson\u2019s \u2018historical\u2019 comment and needs an introduction.\u00a0 Educators don\u2019t want to be overwhelmed by the possibilities or fantasies about what could be, or have to deal with a steep learning curve, they want to understand the basic concepts and to know how they can start using it now.\u00a0 The article would have served educators better if Anderson had shown how a Wiki or a blog could be used on a small scale, e.g., show how a Wiki could be used by a group of students to collect material for a project.\u00a0 Once educators had some experience and improved their comfort level they could move beyond the classroom and use the technology to its fullest potential.<\/p>\n
Alexander, B. (2006). Web 2.0 A New Wave of Innovation for Teaching and Learning? Educause<\/em> , 33-44.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" One of the most interesting and telling statements in the article, \u2018Web 2.0 A New Wave of Innovation for Teaching and Learning?\u2019 comes when author Bryan Alexander is discussing the wiki.\u00a0 After describing how the wiki works he says, \u201cThey originally hit the Web in the late 1990s (another sign that Web 2.0 is emergent […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":626,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4975],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2324","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary-3"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec540sept09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2324","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec540sept09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec540sept09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec540sept09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/626"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec540sept09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2324"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec540sept09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2324\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2325,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec540sept09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2324\/revisions\/2325"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec540sept09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2324"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec540sept09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2324"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec540sept09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2324"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}