Web 2.0: Promoting Collaboration and Student-Centered Learning
Proponents of constructivist and socio-cultural models of how people learn recognize that students' perspectives and prior understandings are important, that context is essential, and that learning is a social activity.
Recent changes in Web application architecture, referred to as Web 2.0, have created opportunities for using the Web to focus on student perspectives and social interactions. Sites designed as Web 2.0 enable users to self-publish content such as photos, opinions, citations, calendars, artwork, bookmarks, interests, theories, or anything else that can be transferred into a digital format. Users retain control of their content and decide with whom to share it. When content is shared with others who have related interests, a rich pool of perspectives develops in such a way that collaboration and community can arise around topics of interest. This can occur by multiple users collaboratively working on a single piece of content (e.g., a wiki), or by individual users describing, or "tagging," their content so that others can easily connect to that content through metadata.
Seminar
Please join us to discuss how Web 2.0 technologies, including blogs and wikis, can be used for teaching and learning:
Wednesday, April 5, 2006
12:00 p.m.—1:30 p.m.
145 Peters Hall, St. Paul
See a UMConnect Meeting recording of the seminar.
David Ernst from the College of Education and Human Development and the Office of Information Technology, Twin Cities campus, will moderate a discussion among the following panelists:
- Shane Nackerud, University Libraries, Twin Cities campus;
- Clancy Ratliff, Department of Rhetoric, College of Agricultural, Food, and Environmental Sciences, Twin Cities campus; and
- Tim Wilson, Hopkins School District.
Visit the TEL seminar presentation wiki and contribute your own comments, questions, or resources to help the panelists prepare for the TEL presentation.
Bibliography
The following readings may help you prepare for the TEL seminar.
Giles, Jim. "Internet Encyclopaedias Go Head to Head." Nature 438 (15 December 2005): 900–901. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v438/n7070/full/438900a.html.
Nature investigated the accuracy of science articles in two online encyclopedias: Wikipedia and Britannica. "The exercise revealed numerous errors in both encyclopaedias, but among 42 entries tested, the difference in accuracy was not particularly great: the average science entry in Wikipedia contained around four inaccuracies; Britannica, about three."
Lowe, Charles, and Terra Williams. "Moving to the Public: Weblogs in the Writing Classroom." In Into the Blogosphere: Rhetoric, Community, and Culture of Weblogs, edited by L. J. Gurak, S. Antonijevic, L. Johnson, C. Ratliff, and J. Reyman. University of Minnesota (accessed 20 February 2006). http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/moving_to_the_public.html.
Lowe and Williams assert that, while weblogs can be used as personal diaries, the potential value of public writing should not be overlooked. "Moving journal writing to the web using weblogs where Internet surfers can read and link to student writing potentially opens our students' texts to the unknown outside of the classroom, but our experience with student blogging has shown that 'less private writing' may equally help writers to compose their lives, albeit in a social, more public way."
Nature. "Editorial: Wiki's Wild World." Nature 438 (15 December 2005): 890. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v438/n7070/full/438890a.html.
The editors of Nature encouraged readers to look up Wikipedia entries related to their work and fix errors and omissions as a way "to push forward the grand experiment that is Wikipedia, and to see how much it can improve."
Wikipedia, s.v. "Web 2.0." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0 (accessed 20 February 2006).
This Wikipedia article describes the history of, issues related to, and technologies associated with the term Web 2.0.
