Discussion this week included some topics on the “hive mind” and how user-led education is stimulated by availability of Web 2.0 tools. Everyone one of us can be instantly connected to experts and plethora of facts on the internet. Web 2.0 tools extend our abilities to collectively gather information and communicate to share content in multiple modes.
The drive towards connective technologies has made for a change in our idea of education. The Web 2.0 influence is making traditional online learning seem somewhat flat when compared to the experiences shared through global networked communities.
I located an article posted on Tim O’Reilly’s blog site, Web Squared, where he mentions that collective intelligence applications are dependent on managing, understanding, and responding to massive amounts of user-generated data in real time. He equates 2.0 with growth towards sensory and participatory networked intelligence (where is this going in 3.0? I think that may be a discussion for another blog post!)
O’Reilly was referenced in the Turkish Journal of Online Education proposing six core competencies of the Web 2.0 environment:
- services, not packaged software,
- an architecture of participation,
- cost-effective scalability,
- re-mixable data source and data transformations,
- software above the level of a single device,
- and harnessing collective intelligence (Web 2.0 Learning Platform, 2005).
What strikes me the most from this list is number 2, “an architecture of participation”. We are seeing even traditional LMS’s, such as Blackboard and Canvas, integrate social media back channels and mobile strategy to accommodate what learners are starting to expect from a learning environment. We can see this too, in big universities move towards MOOCs and open sharing of content.
Web Learning 2.0 