The impact and relevance of Web 2.0 to the culture of higher education Stylianos Hatzipanagos Kings College London.

The impact and relevance of Web 2.0 to the culture of higher

education

Stylianos HatzipanagosKing’s College London

Presentation Overview

• Before social software• VLE hype and reality: content creation

transmissive paradigms• Social networking and digital literacies• Assessment• Virtual worlds• The future?

A glimpse of the future

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Phenomena in 21st Higher Education

A Google search for:

‘Plato republic’ 370,000 results‘Plato republic commentary’ 18700 results‘Plato Republic free essay ‘ 68,500 results

Thinktank Demos 2009, UK

Hatzipanagos & Warburton 2009

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Peter Jarvis, 1992

Peter Jarvis

“Learning is personal change”

Common Models

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Drivers for technology enhanced learning (TEL)

To improve flexibility and quality of learning and teachingin response to:

– Move towards lifelong learning and widening participation.

– Increasing diversity in student population and modes of attendance (part-time, at a distance, open/flexible, and work based).

e-literacy in pedagogical terms

Required set of competencies for teaching practitioners is more complex and consists of:

• Updated knowledge of TEL resources and their role in enriching the learner experience.

• Expertise of range of tools and of the pedagogical affordances that each provides

• Ability to evaluate technologies and engage in reflection on how they impact on learning

VLEs• VLEs as approximations of a space that is

problematic : the non-interactive lecture theatre• Focus on content rather than interaction• Difficulties in monitoring student learning• An insular environment • Non customizable/adaptable

What is a VLE 2.0?

From provision to connectingThe Personal Learning Environment

• Currently we provide learners and teachers with technology - we ‘give them a space’, email accounts etc.

• The PLE approach would be instead to enable connecting people with each other and resources of mutual relevance

Wilson

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Social Media in Higher Education

• Blogs (reflective aspect)• Wikis (collaborative construction of knowledge)• Social bookmarking (sharing personal

references with some form of commentary)• Social networking (discussion, communication,

formal and informal spaces)• Immersive environments (virtual worlds,

MUVEs)

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Potentially endless Possibilities(Conole 2007)

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Designing Meaningful Materials

Good design begins with the study of student prior knowledge

Good teaching involves teachers and students in the sharingof newly emerging knowledge structures

Good teaching also involves students in the rehearsal ofactivities they will need to complete for assessment

Choosing the right tool(s)?

http://www.go2web20.net over 3000 apps 17

FA and technologies

Learning technologies promote innovative assessment practices and lead to deeper thinking about how tutors conceptualise assessment in higher education (McCormick 2004).

Assessment practices have been supported by technology for many years. However…

….main focus on developing tools such as objective tests rather than addressing fundamental issues, such as how they can be used to support effective assessment approaches (Nicol and Milligan, 2006).

Characteristics of FA technologies

Can be used as living record of student learning

Blur boundaries between formal and informal learning spaces

Challenge dominant model of hierarchical, tutor centred education

Embrace an ideology of openness, dialogue and ownership.

e-assessment: range of technologies

Non-formative

– Objective tests (they ‘disagree’ with certain disciplines)– Model answers received or revealed after students submit an answer, as

non-personalised feedback– Electronic submission of coursework

Formative

– Communication tools in VLEs– Online tutorials– Games that allow monitoring and intervention – Audio to canvas opinions/understanding of concepts/issues. Audio more

meaningful conceptually than video– Tools such as certainty based marking– Videoconferencing– Social software: Blogs, wikis– e-portfolios

Immersive environmentsCompletely removed from face-to-face learning experiences as

participants have to negotiate: • a sense of dislocation from familiar physical spaces; • a set of competencies that could be broadly described as enhanced

digital literacies; • operating under an assumed identity that may or may not facilitate

communication. • induction and familiarisation with the environments does not

necessarily mean that learners can benefit from their affordances. • The related pedagogy is challenging for the educators as tasks have to

be designed specifically for the attributes of such environments.

Warburton, Hatzipanagos & Perez-Garcia, 2009

Muvenation: a SecondLife MUVE

Necessary technologies• A space to talk. • A space to complete activities. • A space to put resources, and

find resources • A personal space to manage your

identity• Single authentication• Work in progress and finished

product

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What about King’s?• Social Networking sites:

on the periphery of learning but a new space (OneSpace) to aggregate student learning inc. web 2.0 communication tools

• Blogs and wikisBlogs more popular, collaborative construction aspect of wikis still underdeveloped, used as communication tools

• Portfolios: • aggregation of above functions,, student-centred features in conflict with

conflict with tutor control and monitoring of the environment.• SecondLife and Wonderland

project-based, not mainstream but hopeful signs it will attract interest from a diverse student body

• Social tagging: chaotic, academic and personal tools• VLE 2.0:

a slow integration process, e.g. powelinks to web 2.0 tools that ease access.

Promising Signs

• Ubiquity and multi-functionality of web 2.0

• Growth of openness and online resources, OERs

• Increasingly effective pedagogical models and learning activities

• Real educational alternatives – including private sector

Anderson 2009

Into the future….

• Web 3.0 applications, driven by semantic web technologies, offer powerful data organization, combination, and query capabilities.

1. Social media applications: tagging and basic metadata, scalability and authorship.

2. Semantic web applications: sophisticated logic-backed data handling technologies, data flexibility and portability

Combine the strengths of these two approaches.

Some questions to explore

1. How do we accredit learning that takes place in informal spaces afforded by learning technologies

2. Are assessment practices in HE stifling innovation?

3. How semantic technologies, especially knowledge representation and collective intelligence, can benefit social web content organization and retrieval

email: Stylianos [email protected]

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