Web 2.0 Tools for Education
My first activity at WCET was putting on a pre-conference session on Web 2.0 tools and technologies with Ritchie Boyd, Darren Crone and Jenny Jopling.
As usual I had far more material gathered together than I could share, which was intentional– I figure if someone is actually interested by something they hear then they can follow up later. If that’s too much for someone then they probably aren’t ready to teach with these tools anyway.
Before I arrived in Atlanta I’d decided that from here on out, if I can get away with it, I’m just going to be presenting my sometimes cantankerous personal position rather than trying to present an ‘objective’ approach because:
- There’s too much out there to survey a significant number of possibilities in any reasonable amount of time
- I want participants to come away with some specific return(s) for the time they’ve entrusted me with
- Anyone who actually listens to me and follows up on my suggestions will quickly learn how to discard the things that don’t fit or work for them.
- And if they don’t follow-up, then they don’t need me and/or are– for whatever reason– not ready to make this jump.
The materials from the session are online, but I can distill them even further. I was surprised at the positive reaction to some guidelines I provided about wikis and was actually able to convey a little of the usefulness of Twitter (thanks in part to the fortuitous presence of Alphabunny).
If only one point sticks, I hope it was/is the last one.
- Learning emerges from community, which is based on conversation.
- Online community demands from its participants skills that come from the triad of information fluency: content, critical thinking, and participation/presentation.
- Blogs are the place to start because they are the most portable, can fill-in for more specialized apps in a pinch, and help put in place valuable general practices… but you can’t approach them half-heartedly. You have to get all connected to all, make use of syndication and aggregation of content and comments, and push practice.
- Teach your students how to contribute– passivity leads to failure because there will be no positive network effects.
- Wikis work in particular ways that most educators don’t understand because they mistake presentation-based activities for collaborative ones, and they’ve learned how wikis work by outliers like Wikipedia.
- Synchronous chat and backchannel activities can, as counterintuitive as it seems, lead to higher comprehension and enhanced participation.
- Twitter is not just a useful tool for participating in a fun conversation of peers, but a direct test of whether one has really made the transition to “information like water.”
- Student resistance to technology is mostly a mask that obscures the real reason for resistance: students aren’t used to being challenged. Participating and being a social learner is a rich experience that demands activity… something a lot of students are unused to.
- If you don’t “walk the walk” and use these tools yourself to create and participate in your own personal learning network, then don’t bother trying to use them in your classroom.
November 9th, 2007 at 4:05 am
Brilliant, on many levels. Thanks for sharing this, Chris.
November 9th, 2007 at 4:43 am
[...] strong and put a bit more directly than you usually see but I really couldn’t agree more. Ruminate » Blog Archive » Web 2.0 Tools for Education If only one point sticks, I hope it was/is the last [...]
November 9th, 2007 at 7:22 am
My recent experience helping teachers see the value in the social web suggests that your point #4 is a very large stumbling block. I don’t know if it’s “passivity” or something else, though. It’s true that students in school (especially the successful ones) are trained to be compliant. But I’m not convinced that passivity, or being unused to challenge, is the problem. There is a broad spectrum of values and personality types among any group of people. People sort themselves accordingly.
I emphatically agree with the final point in your list.
November 9th, 2007 at 9:03 am
Session looks fantastic. Wish I could have been there. (Though your Twits and Scott’s Twits make me feel… maybe less so.)
November 9th, 2007 at 6:18 pm
[...] chris added an interesting post on Web 2.0 Tools for Education.Here’s a small excerpt:My first activity at WCET was putting on a pre-conference session on Web 2.0 tools and technologies with Ritchie Boyd, Darren Crone and Jenny Jopling. As usual I had far more material gathered together than I could share, … [...]
November 10th, 2007 at 7:58 pm
Doug– #4 could be better phrased. I mean ‘passive’ in a less negative sense than it comes across. The main point is that without activity by the participant, the network remains passive and the positive effects minimal or non-existent.
However, I do think that a fair amount of resistance and unwillingness to engage in social acts of learning– at least at the University level and in my experience– does come from that kind of environment posing a hard, new challenge. I know it is challenging for *me*…
November 10th, 2007 at 7:59 pm
The sessions were a mixed bag, though I think I got a bit luckier than Scott! Still, the hallway conversations, dinner and coffee meetings were great.
November 12th, 2007 at 6:26 pm
Alaska…
I arrived in Alaska late yesterday for a week-long stint as a visiting scholar at University of Alaska Fairbanks. I delivered a few presentations today: Connectivism 101: For the Curious and Organizational Impact of Networked Learning. But the most val…
November 14th, 2007 at 6:24 pm
Do you know of any free blog program that lets you preview your blog privately for an indefinate amount of time before posting it live on the web?
November 18th, 2007 at 9:08 am
9 is absolute.
6 is discomfiting to me without something empirical to Back It Up. (”Synchronous chat and backchannel activities can, as counterintuitive as it seems, lead to higher comprehension and enhanced participation.”) Gimme gimme research results. Haven’t seen anything on this topic, but I bet you could do it, Mr. Lott.
November 18th, 2007 at 5:46 pm
As in many of the points, I have only my experience to back this up anecdotally. I figure it this way: students have been occupying their minds with other things since long before there were any digital tools to do so. If by having a backchannel that is ostensibly oriented towards the class I am able to capture even a sliver of that attention that would otherwise drift away, then it’s a plus. And in my experience it is almost inevitable that people who tend to chat a lot are people who are more silent when I’ve had them in other classes or when the chat is not available. I can quantitatively state that the great majority of the chatting in the backchannel is somewhat related to class… I suspect that is not the case with general IM. I also suspect that this ability to talk to one another reinforces a kind of class community and I have seen that community at work.
My real point is that it goes against everything I have experienced– and the experience of others I have talked to about it– to believe that trying to block wireless and close laptop lids and artificially constrain attention has any real positive benefit. It’s a fallacy that if my eyes are not on my computer screen then I must be paying attention to the instructor… if anything, the minute someone issues that edict I tune even *further* out– but I’m contrary that way
Of course, there are various situations where it makes sense to limit other activities… I am thinking here in the general case of “lecture” and other instructional class time that isn’t devoted to actual group activity.