April 2008 — News
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Crossroads in Education: Issues for Web 2.0, Social Software, and Digital Tools
Selection is not an easy process. Longevity is also an issue, as Brian Kelly of UKOLN (2008) pointed out. Relying on the many free and open source products might in the long run pose a problem, as the best of those might end up as commercial products. Others might disappear quickly when interests of the developers change or financing their efforts becomes a concern. According to Kelly, "It appears risky to rely on services which may disappear at any time, where no support contract is available, no guarantee of bugs being fixed or formal processes for prioritisation of developments" (sec: Longevity).Management will need to decide on its support structure: centralized or decentralized. In a centralized system, management would select applications and make those available via a portal. How will it choose and then provide the technical and professional development to staff? This approach limits experimentation and innovation, as new applications quickly arise in the Web 2.0 environment. In a decentralized system, teachers would be free to select and experiment with applications of interest, adopting or dropping those as the situation might warrant. However, it might very well happen that teachers would have to develop their own support group among colleagues with similar interests, including for when technology problems arise.
Sustaining Innovation
Either way, teachers will need to take a greater role in action research, reporting on what works or does not work and why. According to the Metiri Group (2006), educators' "lack of effort in documenting the effect on student learning, teacher practices, and system efficiencies" in the last decade is one of their miscalculations that has resulted in "the real potential of technology for improving learning [remaining] largely untapped in schools today" (p. 2). Even at higher education levels, "there is very little reliable, original pedagogic research and evaluation evidence" regarding social software. "[T]o date, much of the actual experimentation within higher education has focused on particular specialist subject areas or research domains" (Fountain, cited in Anderson, 2007, p. 32). With a research base, curriculum developers will be in a better position to know which curricular areas will benefit most from social software and tools, and others in which those technologies might be nice to have or really not needed.
While some students might be highly motivated to use Web 2.0 tools and have their creations viewed by a global audience, others might not share that desire. Are there differences in the learning styles of those students who use those compared to those who do not and might not have a desire to broadcast their creations within social media sites? This impacts how educators differentiate instruction. When is it important to learn in collaboration with others, and when does learning in isolation lead to greater achievement?
