The social software driven approach reflects the nature of learning and knowledge as being social, personal, distributed, flexible and dynamic. It represents a shift towards a more personalized, open and knowledge-pull model for learning. The platform, developed and prototypical in use at Varna Free University, is based on concepts like social tagging and networking and therefore offers its users a new perspective of Web 2.0 driven learning.
Web 2.0 brings new possibilities and tools to e-learning. Social software supports active social networking processes and a community model to foster knowledge sharing and collaboration. Blogs and wikis represent new repositories of information and knowledge for personal and organisational purposes. High quality contrib utions are assured not only by guidelines, but also by reputation and rating the contributions. Through social software, students especially in LLL process are more motivated to share knowledge with others. Organizations have to decide whether they want to build their own internal proprietary solutions with blogs, wikis and/or social networks or with the use of existing tools. Although anyone can use social software and edit a blog or a wiki, not everybody does. Effective social structures may create incentives and guide fruitful collaborations.
The Web 2.0 era has emerged as a shift of perspective from a world of plentiful information that has to be searched using powerful search engines to a world in which the social process has become central for identification and access to information and knowledge. In this new world, a variety of tools have been developed to better manage the social capital (with social networking systems such as Plaxo, LinkedIn), to communicate more effectively with blogs, and/or to harness collective intelligence with systems such as wikis.
Open source LMS, such as Moodle, have an advantage here in that designers in universities with access to open source developers can build and integrate open source web 2.0 tools into the LMS quite easily.
This chapter suggests that Web 2.0 tools provide an opportunity for new developments of the e-learning concept and discusses these new approaches developed with the objective of operationalising this social perspective in the context of managing personal kn owledge. Web 2.0 enables a new model of e-learning that contributes to collective intelligence through formal and informal communication, collaboration and social networking tools. This new model facilitates virtual interaction, social processes, collaboration and knowledge exchanges on the web. A characteristic of such systems is the fact that they are open and designed to invite collaboration and to facilitate social interaction.
There are numerous ways that faculties can use the Web 2.0 tools to enhance student’s interaction in online learning. Incorporation of Web 2.0 tools such as blogs and wikis into online and hybrid courses has the potential for improving student engagement in learning. As shown through examples from our teaching and from the literature, these tools can facilitate rich interaction among students, the faculties, and the online interaction, the cornerstone of effective online learning.
In blogs and wikis externalisation of personal knowledge is self-initiated. Furthermore, despite using Web 2.0 tools it is still difficult to find the right piece of information. Better search functionalities and sorted entries are an issue that needs to be addressed in further development. Semantic Web technologies enhance Web 2.0 tools and their associated data with semantic annotations and semantic-enhanced knowledge representations, thus enabling a better automatic processing of data which in turn will lead to enhanced search mechanisms.
- 1129 reads
