EdTech provides consulting, training, outreach and educational services
for faculty, instructors and staff using educational technologies.
EdTech provides consulting, training, outreach and educational services
for faculty, instructors and staff using educational technologies.
Professor Michael Wesch (Anthropology, Kansas State) created a class assignment where his students commented upon their current lifestyles and learning contexts using Google Docs. Using this student-created data, Wesch and his class produced a short video that visualized their results. Prof. Wesch then posted this short video on YouTube, and the rest is web history. With over one million views, the video went "viral" as they say, generating attention, comments, and feedback from numerous students and academics around the world. The collaborative, student-driven mode of production of "A Vision of Students Today," its quick dissemination across the web, and the subject itself (time demands on students and their use of technology) exemplify why educators should pay attention to the revolutionary possibilities of Web 2.0.
The term "Web 2.0" was coined by Dale Dougherty in 2005 in order to describe what appeared to be historic changes in the nature of the Internet. Looking back at the dot.com bubble collapse of 2001, Dougherty, Tim O’Reilly, and other Internet gurus focused on those web technologies that survived the crash, celebrating "next generation" Internet tools such as Google Maps, YouTube, the photo-sharing site Flickr, and Wikipedia. These applications were built on "an architecture of participation" in which users create, develop, and modify the content and services as they use them (O’Reilly, "Architecture of Participation"). These services are consequently more social, dynamic, and participatory than Web 1.0 sites, where "surfers" could only explore web sites, not contribute to them. These developments in web-based applications and services dovetailed with greater access of the masses to professional media editing software, allowing amateurs to produce iMovies on their home computers and enabling a legion of kids, teens, and geeks to remix, mash-up, and self produce their own digital images, audios, and videos.
Currently, the creative and participatory nature of Web 2.0 applications is stimulating interest and excitement among educators on the Illinois campus. Librarians and instructors in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS), for example, have joined Curriculum and Instruction Assistant Professor Sharon Tettegah in developing learning environments in the 3D virtual world of Second Life. Following the example of collaborative writing and knowledge creation in Wikipedia, Norma Scagnoli in Human Resources Education, Joe Grohens of English, and various instructors in Computer Science are using wiki software for their classes. Assistant Professor Christian Sandvig (Speech Communications) and CIO & Associate Professor Lanny Arvan (College of Business) are veteran educational bloggers on our campus. Professor Cleo D’Arcy and Associate Professor Darin Eastburn (Crop Sciences) create short, weekly podcasts for their Plants and Pathology class, with their undergraduate students reporting positively on this supplementary guide to their learning. Professor Joseph Squier (Fine and Applied Arts) and Maria Lovett (Illinois Ph.D., now a faculty member at Florida International University) developed the very popular "Writing With Video" program in which students develop textual and media skills with the aid of desktop media tools and blogs. Instructor Eric Snodgrass (Atmospheric Sciences) helps explicate complex meteorological concepts and grab students’ attention with short, easily available YouTube videos. Even the seemingly frivolous social networking site Facebook is being used by the library and instructors to connect with students and deliver content.
The most obvious reason educators should explore Web 2.0 technologies is simply because this is the way the world's information, learning, and collaboration is going. This historical moment reflects, in effect, the coming-of-age of the Internet as an information medium. Educators, as people driven by curiosity and continuous learning, are finding Web 2.0 a boon to their personal educational journey as well as their professional research interests.
More importantly, the enhanced social participation, collaboration, customization and "folk" ownership of content that Web 2.0 affords have proven valuable to early adopters in education. For example, any wiki application provides for an amazing degree of collaboration, improving even upon face-to-face collaboration and electronic sharing of word processing files. As one Illinois writing instructor reports, the wiki has proven to be an ideal complement to the traditional computer writing laboratory. Amazingly, Google Docs (which allows web-based collaboration on word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation documents) now allows simultaneous editing by multiple authors on single documents without co-authors writing over one another's edits and work—try that in the real world!
In the olden days (three years ago) before Web 2.0, if I wanted to share my pictures with the world, I built web pages and uploaded them to a web server where web surfers may or may not have stumbled across them. Web 1.0 was nice, but it assumed that I could build web pages and had a server to put them on, and that my audience would work hard at searching and surfing to find my content. And it was all one-way. I share my pictures. You look at them. Now there are countless Web 2.0 enhanced photo-sharing sites that go way beyond easily sharing photos with the world to building communities around those photos and shared interests. Flickr, launched in February 2004, is still my favorite. With Flickr I upload my photos, edit their titles, tags and descriptions, organize them into sets and collections, drag and drop them onto maps to show where they were taken, and share them with the world.
One of the best ways to share your photos with the world in Flickr is to join relevant interest groups. I shoot nature photos and recently have been doing dragonflies, so Ive joined three dragonfly groups where members from all over the world share their dragonfly photos, comment on and annotate each others photos, engage in discussions and learn from each other. As a result of being in these groups, I enjoy excellent photos of dragonflies from all over the world on a daily basis. Other groups, such as "Rate My Nature" provide feedback on a certain number of photos posted by others in exchange for getting feedback on your own photos a great way to hone your photography skills.
There are professional academic concerns and issues that need to be resolved before universities fully embrace the contemporary web: privacy, FERPA, web and computer security, content ownership and copyright, and institutional rights and responsibilities. For example, Illinois State law currently limits official campus involvement with Second Life, the massive virtual environment that many other commercial, private, and not-for-profit agencies have already begun colonizing. Concerns, both legal and institutional, are natural and expected during any time of social and technological revolution, but they should not immobilize us while the world passes us by.
Behind the success of Web 2.0 are vast improvements in the global and campus computing infrastructures, with more and better desktops, laptops, handhelds, high resolution screens, computer power, as well as higher bandwidth, greater wireless access, and improved security. Because of this virtuous circle of better infrastructure and web tools, we are finally witnessing the fulfillment of the promises made regarding the early Internet. As we educators move forward it will be important to recognize that teens and 'twenty-somethings' are most different from older generations in regard to technology not so much for any greater facility with technology, but primarily for their expectations that technology works well nearly all the time and should assume a significant role in their lives and learning environments. For educators from older generations, who suffered through many technological slow starts, false starts, and even dead-ends, we will need to guard against old habits of technological cynicism and fatigue. The most amazing thing about Web 2.0 is that it actually works very well nearly all the time.
The vast majority of Web 2.0 offerings have been brought to us from the private sector, but our own campus has been piloting and opening new Web 2.0 services such as wikis, blogs, podcasting, RSS syndication, digital image, audio, and video production, and community-based web site platforms like Drupal. In particular, CITES is rolling out a new wiki service that provides a great collaboration platform for teachers, researchers, administrative units, and outreach programs. Our CITES wiki provides for file sharing, blog postings and comments, easy integration with the web-based diagram creator Gliffy, and the ability to create a web site that can be as informal or professional-looking as one wants.
Another exciting Web 2.0 technology that our campus is rolling out is iTunes U, essentially an academic space in Apple’s popular, free iTunes software (available for Mac and Windows) where universities like Yale, Berkeley, MIT, Penn State, Stanford, and Texas Tech offer online audio and video lectures, courses, and special events. These include everything from MIT’s Prof. Walter Lewin’s lectures on Electricity and Magnetism to Texas A&M’s ten-minute "Email Etiquette" tips from their Writing Center. Any faculty, staff or campus unit interested in being a part of our Illinois iTunes U, or just exploring podcasting in general, should contact edtech@illinois.edu.
Anyone interested in exploring any Web 2.0 applications can contact CITES EdTech at edtech@illinois.edu for a free consult.
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