April 2008 — News
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Crossroads in Education: Issues for Web 2.0, Social Software, and Digital Tools
We are at a crossroads in educating our youth. Since public schools became the norm for education, we've identified curriculum based on the social, political, and economic need. We've classified what counts into tight packages of content in subject areas as math, science, social studies, and so on. Echoing Owen, Grant, Sayers, and Facer (2006), our approach to teaching and learning, including the order and how information is presented to students, the stages of assessment and what constitutes appropriate discussion on those subjects have also been tightly defined (p. 31). Advancements in technology, principally Web 2.0, social software, and digital tools, have challenged what it means to be educated and how we proceed to educate our youth in a culture where innovation and creativity, lifelong learning, personalization (my own learning space), and knowledge from and with the collective vie for a rightful place.
The issues we face surround the dilemma of achieving personalization while maintaining standards (KnowledgeWorks Foundation, 2006). Students do need structure from experienced teachers and core subject matter knowledge; however, as Owen and his colleagues (2006) pointed out, their use of social software has opened up new sources of that knowledge leading to times when it would be appropriate to use "more weakly classified and framed approaches to learning" (p. 31). Let's look at some of the issues and implications for curriculum, instruction, and integration support, which will need open discussions with educators, parents, students, the community, policy makers, and technology developers, if we are to resolve the dilemma.
Creativity and Collaboration
Social software changes what it means to be creative. Very little may be truly original, as people appropriate content, adapt it for their needs, mix it up, and distribute it "in a way in which consumption of media and information also becomes a productive act" (Owen et al., 2006, p. 39). There are at least two implications for curriculum.
First, issues raised about creativity indicate that we need greater attention to teaching about the legal ramifications of intellectual property rights, copyright, and plagiarism and that revisiting the definition of cheating ight be in order. As many student creations are done in collaboration with others, I agree with Owen and his colleagues that we need to remove the stigma from collaboration. "[I]t is no longer cheating to find out from or gain the advice of other people or to use information sources not already in your head" (p. 40), but we do need to explicitly teach learners how to acknowledge their sources.
Second, students create all forms of multimedia from their printed words to audio, video, and image artifacts, many of which they share on social sites. Those who can work with a variety of media demonstrate a broader range of thinking skills than those who can only create in text-mode.
