High Quality
Open the downloaded document, and select print from the file menu (PDF reader required).
How many penguins does it take to sink an iceberg? – The challenges and opportunitiesof Web 2.0 in education.
Chances are that if you’re over 25 the title of this paper will have left you feeling either confused or dismayed, perhaps even a little both. Confused because you are wondering what possible connection could be made between penguins, the Internet and education? Dismayed because you’re still coming to terms with Web 1 and here is someone talking about Web 2.0.Therefore, some further explanation of the title is likely to be helpful.The term Web 2.0 is widely regarded to have been coined by an industry visionary called TimO’Reilly in 2004. In technology the number after the decimal point refers to a revision of anexisting technology, the number preceding it refers to a paradigm shift where the technologyhas undergone such a substantial change as to become something different. Therefore,according to a recent BECTA report,
Web 2.0 technologies for learning at Key Stages 3 and 4
(2008), “Web 2.0 is a catch-all term to describe a variety of developments on the web and a perceived shift in the way the web is used. This has been characterised as the evolution of web use from passive consumption of content to more active participation, creation andsharing – to what is sometimes called the ‘read/write’ web. These are internet activities andtools that are broadly concerned with encouraging communication and participation amonginternet users.” Thomas March in
Revisiting Webquests in a Web 2 World
(2007) helpfullyadds that the significance of Web 2.0 lies not in the technological revolution, impressive as itis, but rather in the social revolution that Web 2.0 facilitates.As the BECTA (2008) report suggests, alongside this new Internet has emerged a range of tools which exploit the technology often requiring no more than access to the Web and a browser. Among the most familiar are Blogs and Wikis and if you are a regular Internet user itis likely you will have come across, perhaps even contributed to, a Blog or Wiki such asWikipedia. Web 2.0 has also facilitated the development of new virtual communities whereindividuals can meet and interact. For example, it is estimated that if the members of socialnetworking site Myspace formed a country it would be the 8th largest in the world.Increasingly such communities are being created around virtual landscapes where virtual people inhabit virtual properties. One such virtual community specifically designed for children is Club Penguin. Children from all over the world create an online persona (or avatar) represented by a penguin and travel through a virtual winter wonderland competing ingames and solving puzzles, sometimes alone, sometimes with the help of online friends. Withan estimated 12 million children registered worldwide, Club Penguin was purchased byDisney in 2007 for a reported $700 million dollars. It was while watching my son play ClubPenguin that I first came to fully appreciate the enormous potential of Web 2.0 as aneducational tool. Ironically, it was not the carefully designed learning opportunities programmed into the various games and quizzes within Club Penguin that caught myattention. Rather, it was the informal, unintended learning being generated by a group of around 50 penguins meeting on a virtual iceberg somewhere in cyberspace that really got methinking.One of the children had suggested it was possible to sink the iceberg and began to persuadeothers to join him on the Northern edge in a vain attempt to tip everyone into the sea.
Unsuccessful but not undeterred, another child suggested jumping up and down. Again,without success. Soon some children began to break away from the main group convincedthey could sink the iceberg by congregating on a different edge. Surmising that more weightwas needed, there then began a process of persuasion and negotiation as competing splinter groups tried to persuade the huddled mass of penguins that their solution was the most likelyto get everyone wet. To use the language of the new Revised Curriculum for Northern Ireland,the children had displayed curiosity and creativity in seeking out a question to explore (canwe sink the iceberg?), generated a possible solution (congregate on the North shore), revisedthe solution (jump up and down), showed commitment, determination and resourcefulness intrying alternative approaches (the splinter groups) all the while communicating andcollaborating with each other to achieve their end goal. In essence, these children hadorganically created a rich learning environment that elicited complex, critical and creativethinking skills which made my attempts to artificially induce such skills in the classroom look frankly amateurish. Clearly Club penguin is unlikely to become the sole vehicle for deliveringour school curriculum but it does illustrate some of the potential for web based learning totransform how we approach the education of our children. It also serves to illustrate theemergence of a growing digital divide between teachers and pupils.Traditionally the term digital divide has been used to describe the problem of access totechnology. While evidently access to technology is still an issue on a global scale, researchsuggests this is not the problem it once was in the UK. According to the UK Children GoOnline report (2005) 75% of 9-19 year olds have accessed the internet from a computer athome while 92% have accessed the internet at school. Coupled with the recent Labour government announcement of a £300 million programme to get low income families onlineand the rapid growth of mobile platforms to browse the Internet, Olivia Stevenson in the UK government report
Harnessing Technology: Transforming Learning and Children’s Services
(2005) suggests we need to look at the digital divide not as a question of access but rather as adescription of how different groups within society use the technology. This difference in theuse of technology can be clearly seen when one compares how pupils and their teachers useWeb 2.0 tools inside and outside school.Several surveys were conducted as part of the BECTA (2008) report. It was found that,“learners’ use of Web 2.0 and related internet activities is extensive.” Of the 2,600 learnerssurveyed across 27 schools, 74% had social networking accounts and 78% had uploadeddigital media (mostly photographs or video clips from phones) to the internet. The teacher survey (which probably reflected the views of keen ICT users as it was online and voluntary)found that while many teachers had used web 2.0 tools outside school, “most had never usedWeb 2.0 applications in lesson time.” Similar findings were reported in the updated
Harnessing Technology: Next Generation Learning
report (2008). In contrast to the very highus of Wikis among young people, 25% of secondary teachers never heard of them. Notsurprisingly, therefore, nearly all Web 2.0 use is currently outside school, and for social purposes. The differing attitude to Web 2.0 tools can perhaps best be illustrated by comparing preferred methods of communication. Several surveys have confirmed that while adults tendto prefer email, children prefer instant messaging. How many schools do you know who have banned the preferred means of communications for this generation? Has yours?
There therefore seems to be good grounds for claiming that our pupils are ‘growing updigital.’ For these ‘Digital Natives’ forced to exist between two very different cultures, goingto school may well feel like travelling in a distant land. It is like a land that time forgot wherethe technological tools and experiences that support their informal learning at home aredismissed as irrelevant in the more formal learning context of the classroom. Thomas Marchin
Revisiting Webquests in a Web 2.0 World
(2007) concludes, “The embarrassing truth is thatin a few short decades, schools have gone from providing many students with their firstexperiences with computers and the Internet to what have become islands of impoverishment.”So why does this new digital divide exist? There is evidence of growth in the use of ICT inthe classroom and a generally positive disposition among teachers. The National Centre for Social Research (2006) found that at least three quarters of subject respondents to their surveystated that ICT was ‘very’or‘quite’important to their subject at Key Stages 1 to 4. 70% of secondary school respondents also thought that ‘all’ or ‘most’ teachers were enthusiastic aboutusing ICT. However, while many teachers have embraced technology it would seem they havelargely done so in an attempt to make their existing teaching more interesting and efficient.The
Harnessing Technology: School Survey
(2008) found that,” Teachers predominantly useICT for whole-class activities, in line with their preferred use of ICT for display and presentational purpose.” Many teachers seem to have become addicted to PowerPoint whichEdward Tufte, an authority on visual display, describes as ‘educational cocaine’, “easy tostart, hard to stop and not very good for you.” It is perhaps no surprise therefore that whilethere has been a dramatic rise in the use of presentational tools such as Interactivewhiteboards and data projectors in schools, Web 2.0 tools with their emphasis on pupil participation and collaboration have had little impact in the classroom. Technology, it wouldseem, has been used to automate teachers’ pedagogy rather than transform it and as aconsequence it is unlikely that the full value of technology is currently being realised inschools.This raises the question of whether the digital divide between teacher and student use of technology, and the resultant divide between the use of Web 2.0 at home and in school, issimply a matter of lack of awareness of what can be achieved using Web 2.0 tools, or a morefundamental resistance to transformation within the education system. In the remainder of this paper I want to tackle the question of awareness head on by looking at 10 reasons why I believe teachers should be using Web 2.0, and then consider how likely it is that Web 2.0 will play a transformational role in our education system.
1.
Web 2.0 Tools are Easy to Use
Given the rate of technological advancement over the last 20 years it is perhapsunderstandable that the focus of many Government and educational initiatives has largely been on questions of infrastructure and hardware. The Ofsted inspection report
ICT inSchools
(2002) found that even where training had been offered it tended to focus onimproving teachers’ personal ICT skills rather than classroom application. Therefore, it seemslikely that lack of awareness of how technology and Web 2.0 tools in particular can be used inthe classroom is part of the reason why there has been little transformation in how teachersuse ICT. This was recognised the
Harnessing Technology
: Next Generation Learning (2008)
Add a Comment
dw10cwleft a comment
joeythibaultleft a comment
dw10cwleft a comment
kapil1312left a comment
dw10cwleft a comment
qaziboy replied: