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Web 2.0 in e-learning

21 一月, 2016 - 14:46

Web 2.0 is a term which is hard to define because of the amorphousness of the concept. Web 2.0 (O’Reilly, 2005) or the Social Web has introduced new concepts and tools that are able to operationalise a more social-centric vision. Online social networking systems, such as LinkedIn, MySpace and Facebook, allow people to manage their interaction with others on a massive scale. Blogs, microblogs (e.g. Twitter) and instant messaging tools (e.g. Skype) have provided communication tools to interact more effectively with others in opened communities. Wikis and social bookmarking aimed at directly supporting PKM and fostering collective intelligence. This trend has appeared so relevant and so promising that many specialists consider this approach to be the future of knowledge management, hoping that these tools will contribute to realizing the challenge of managing knowledge (Kakizawa, 2007; McAfee, 2006; Shimazu and Koike, 2007). This perspective raises a number of questions related to the application of a vision that was born from the need to incorporate more of the social dimension (Nabeth et al., 2002; Thomas et al., 2001) and to better fit the individual needs of knowledge workers (Razmerita, 2005). PKM on Web 2.0 is achieved by a set of tools that allow people to create, codify, organize and share knowledge, but also to socialize, extend personal networks, collaborate on organizing knowledge and create new knowledge.

After O'Reilly, Paul McFedries (2006) presents a tentative definition according to which web 2.0 is “a second phase of the evolution of the World Wide Web in which developers create Web sites that act like desktop programs and encourage collaboration and communication between users”. McFedries identifies the main characteristics of the Web 2.0 “movement”, highlighting the social perspective of relation, collaboration and user-participated architecture:

  • content is user-created and maintained (peer production, user-content ecosystem);
  • user-created and maintained content require radical trust;
  • application usability allows rich user experience;
  • combining data from different sources leads to creation of new services (mashup);
  • services get better as the number of users increases in architecture of participation.

In the last few years, there has been an increasing focus on social software applications and services as a result of the rapid development of Web 2.0 concepts. Nowadays, the web is a platform, in which content is created and shared facilitating social connection and information interchange. Social software technologies include wikis, blogs, podcasts, RSS and social tagging. Web 2.0 tools are designed for ease of use and rapidity of deployment, making possible powerful information sharing (Boulos et al., 2006). Web 2.0 is informed by a “constructivist” understanding of learning in which students devise their own conceptual models for understanding.

Collaboration is the best feature of Web 2.0 that can help e-learning. It was not technically difficult to introduce a collaborative tool on top of a learning system accessible over web. However, fostering collaboration among a group of users is a challenge and Web 2.0 makes it very easy. Using Web 2.0 tools, people do not only passively consume information; rather, they are active contributors, even customizing tools and technology for their use. Web 2.0 facilitates social networking and collaboration and therefore is also referred to as the Social Web. The underlying principle of the Social Web is to make use of the “wisdom of the crowd” and “user generated content”. The wisdom of the crowd is a term coined by Surowiecki (2005) who argues that large groups of people are smarter than an elite few. No matter how intelligent they are, large groups of people are better at solving problems, fostering innovation, coming to wise decisions and even predicting the future. In this highly interconnected, dynamic world, new ways of cultivating and exploiting knowledge sharing with customers, suppliers and partners are forcing companies to expand their knowledge management concepts and agendas (Mentzas et al., 2007). There is also the second phase of knowledge management where companies try to exploit a much richer form of knowledge assets, including blogs, wikis and social networks, focusing on the social, collaborative dimension of Web 2.0.

In the table below characteristics of some sample web 2.0 tools are highlighted.

Table 1.1 Sample web 2.0 applications: description and “social networking” characteristics (Pettenati & Ranieri, 2006).

Web Application

Description

Characteristics

Social networking, online social networks

Category of Internet applications to help connect friends, business partners, or other individuals together using a variety of tools.

Architecture of Participation

Social network

Search engines

Social network search engines are a class of search engines that use social networks to organize, prioritize, or filter search results

Architecture of Particiaption

Blogs

A weblog, (or blog), is a website where entries are made displayed in chronological order. They often provide commentary or news on a particular subject, typically combining text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to the specific topic.

User-created and maintained content

Blog guides

Specialized search engines for searching blog and news Contents

Architecture of Participation

Social tagging,

(folksonomy)

Ad hoc classification scheme (tags) that web users invent as they surf to categorize the data they find online

Architecture of participation, trust

Social bookmarking

Saving and applying keywords to one’s personal collection of Web site bookmarks on a site that enables other people to share those bookmarks

Architecture of participation, trust

Web Syndication,

Web feed management

Web syndication is a form of syndication in which a section of a website is made available for other sites to use through to making Web feeds available from a site in order to provide other people an updated list of content from it (for example one’s latest forum postings, etc.)

User created and maintained content, content aggregation

Tag clouds

A list of tags user in the site with some kind of visual indication of each tag’s relative popularity (ex. large font). Web sites that implement tag clouds functions allow both finding a tag by alphabet and by popularity.. Selecting a single tag within a tag cloud will generally lead to a collection of items that are associated with that tag

Architecture of participation

Peer production news

Websites combining social bookmarking, blogging, and syndication with a form of nonhierarchical, democratic editorial control. News stories and websites are submitted by users, and then promoted to the front page through a user-based ranking system

User created and maintained content, trust

Wikis

Collaborative web sites that allows users to add, edit and delete content

User created and maintained content, trust

Collaborative real time editing

Simultaneous editing of a text or media file by different participants on a network.

User created and maintained content

Content aggregation and management, mashup (web application hybrid)

A website or web application that combines content from more than one source

User created and maintained content, trust, architecture of participation

 

The traditional approach to e-learning has been to employ the use of a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), software that is often cumbersome and expensive - and which tends to be structured around courses, timetables, and testing. That is an approach that is too often driven by the needs of the institution rather than the individual learner. In contrast, e-learning 2.0 (as coined by Stephen Downes) takes a 'small pieces, loosely joined' approach that combines the use of discrete but complementary tools and web services - such as blogs, wikis, and other social software - to support the creation of ad-hoc learning communities. The learning process is social, personal, dynamic and distributed in nature, a fundamental shift is needed towards a more personalized, open and knowledge-pull model for learning, as opposed to the centralized, static and knowledge-push models of traditional learning solutions (Chatti et al., 2007). Web 2.0 leads to this new generation of technology enhanced learning. The communication with the students can be realized through blogs and wikis and the concept of tagging and folksonomies offers a great potential for learners to express their own vocabulary (Vanderwal, 2005).

Web 2.0 supports knowledge networking and community building. For example, wikis create an opportunity for collaborative content creation and social interaction. Further, these tools do not require advanced technical skills to use their features, allowing users to focus on the information exchange and collaborative tasks themselves without first mastering a difficult technological environment (Kirkpatrick, 2006). Such "transparent technologies" (Wheeler, Kelly, & Gale, 2005) allow the user to concentrate more on the task because they can "see through" the technology with which they are interacting.