“Web 2.5, Web 3.0, Web 4.5, Web n: whatever it is, I’m enjoying the ride. The pieces are coming together. Glue, indeed.” (Cross, 2006).
Traditional teaching and learning methods and institutions will not go away. They will still be necessary to provide research-based knowledge, structure, and social context for learning. The new technologies will not replace traditional learning but complement it. The history of technology shows us that few technologies replace previous technologies; instead they emerge to coexist and complement them. Television did not kill radio or movies. The Internet has not replaced books. The new technologies discussed in this chapter will be used primarily for extending the ability to create, communicate, and collaborate.
Create
With Web 1.0, almost everyone was a consumer. Only technology wizards had the power to create. Now that online technologies have advanced, Web 2.0 enables almost anyone to be a producer as well as a consumer. Pushing this to education, Web 2.0 tools such as blogs and wikis create a level playing field, where faculty, parents, and even students compete with vendors to produce educational content. Going beyond Web 2.0, technology will raise the bar yet again so that everyone can produce educational activities and assessment strategies that incorporate or go beyond the static content.
With this new equality, we face some familiar challenges. Web 1.0 brought us information overload. It still is not easy for everyone to consistently and quickly find the information they seek online. The same holds true for Web 2.0 information, if not more so, since there are so many more information providers. As the quantities of both producers and products grow, quality becomes more difficult to distinguish as well. Instructors today do their students a great service by asking them to consider validity, reliability, and bias of online information. Looking forward to Web 2.5, Web 3.0, and beyond, we will rely on context-sensitive searching, intelligent searching, peer review ratings, and content expert review ratings to separate the digital chaff from the digital wheat. Finding instructional content and activities to meet almost any learning objectives will continue to become easier, but finding quality instruction will take more effort.
Communicate
In many countries around the world today, communication by cell phones is ubiquitous. Trends in mobile and social computing will make it possible for learners to create and interact with learning communities. For example, using course rosters as “buddy lists” in connection with wireless, mobile devices such as personal digital assistants (PDAs), students will be able to identify if their peers are nearby on campus. Someone in a large section class with more than 100 students will be able to use technology to create a sense of community. The social computing phenomenon will move beyond using static Web pages to share party pictures with peers to using digital storytelling to share competencies with future employers. Instead of smart mobs protesting a political decision, “smart study groups” will form to prepare for quizzes or to provide feedback about written assignments before submitting them for a grade.
Communication challenges in education will include infrastructure, resources, and freedom of speech. Maintaining an adequate communication infrastructure for learning means setting up wireless networks throughout a campus or even throughout a metropolitan area. This work is expensive, labour intensive, and requires a great deal of planning. Educational organizations do not always have the right amount of resources to keep communications running smoothly. Chapter 26, Techno Expression, covers bridging the gap between allowing freedom of expression and setting boundaries to restrict inappropriate behaviour. Despite the power of emerging technologies in education, this balance is difficult to achieve.
Collaborate
With both current and emerging technologies, people sometimes collaborate without the intention or knowledge of doing so. Mashups, for instance, require multiple parties to play a role, but only the person who creates the final product really knows what pieces were required to make it work. Even people who make APIs to enable others to use their tools do not know how they will be used. The makers of Google Maps probably did not predict WeatherBonk (http://weatherbonk.com), a popular mashup that lets people view real-time weather on top of a detailed satellite map. Similarly, wikis require contributions from several parties to be successful. The strength of Wikipedia is in the number of people who contribute ideas and who police the site. For evidence of the power of collaboration, note the number of Wikipedia references in this collaboratively written book!
The future of collaboration involves repurposing the emerging technologies to meet educational goals. Instead of weather map mashups with live webcams, we will see underground railroad map mashups with links to writings from former slaves and re-enactments. Students in certain cities can see if their neighbourhood had any homes that participated in aiding slaves get to the Northern states.
Collaboration poses its own challenges. If not facilitated well, it can devolve into anarchy or, at the very least, into the specter of unmet potential. While constructivist theory has become more popular, completely unguided group learning can lead to large groups of people who collaboratively teach each other with misinformation and groupthink. Facilitating educational collaboration requires both structure and flexibility. You can provide structure by defining expectations, writing clear instructions, setting deadlines for each assignment or project component, and being consistent in how you facilitate online collaboration. You can provide flexibility by allowing students to take turns moderating online discussions, giving students choices about which project they pick or which group they join and being willing to move in new directions that emerge during the collaborative exchanges.
Teaching and learning still relies on people—expert learners and beginning learners—more than technology.
