Using & Teaching Educational Technology
Embedding Web 2.0
By Terry Freedman
Wed, 30 May 2007, 09:36

In most classes in most schools, the use of Web 2.0 is not embedded. What does the term "embedded" mean in this context? For me, it means something similar to the working definition adopted, de facto, for "e-maturity", a term that is increasingly used to describe the level of use of educational technology in UK schools. To paraphrase: if a school cannot function effectively, or even at all, without Web 2.0, then Web 2.0 can be said to be embedded.

It seems to me that at the moment there is a polarisation of viewpoints about Web 2.0. There are a few pioneers, experimenting either on a large and public scale, such as Vicki Davis and Julie Lindsay, the educators behind the Horizon Project, or a smaller and /or more private scale, such as a number of people I'm aware of who are trying things out, such as Leon Cych, on the one hand. In fact, the ebook I edited, Coming of Age: An Introduction to the NEW Worldwide Web, especially the second edition (which will be published soon) is, in effect, a catalogue of people who are currently experimenting and sharing their findings.

At the other end of the scale, you have the people who are positively against using Web 2.0 tools. They mean well, but their reasoning, which is often based on concerns for children's safety, doesn't quite stand up to scrutiny. After all, you don't protect children from being run over by not allowing them out on the streets, but by holding their hand and teaching them a few survival rules. But that's an argument for another time.

In the middle, you have the vast majority of people who have either not heard of Web 2.0, who have heard of it and know nothing about it, or who know about it but are too bogged down in worrying about grades and inspections and their jobs to want to put their head above the parapet.

In addition, the tools themselves are not yet mature. There are new developments in existing applications and innovatory new ones all the time -- so much so that it is is very difficult to keep up-to-date and actually use these new tools at the same time. I've recently been involved in a project for Naace, a subject association and interest group for ICT in education in the UK, and of which I am currently the Chair, in which we were amassing links to resources in a number of areas of educational technology, and using a variety of collaborative tools to do so. The team leader for the section of which I was a member, Leon Cych, kept finding new collaborative tools to try out. Whilst this is very exciting, and partly what we were there to do, it doesn't recommend itself to the busy teacher who is more concerned wth the end product (raising the students' grades) than the process of achieving it. It feels, to use another analogy, rather like trying to measure the length of something with a ruler whose dimensions keep changing.

I regard the current state of the technology as "clunky", a term which I use to describe a situation in which things don't naturally fit together but have somehow been made to work. Some of us have been here before. When I started using a word processor, you had to enter codes for attributes like bold, italic, centred text and so on, and you wouldn't really know what it looked like until you printed it out. Later on, I was experimenting with an early form of web pages, a form of teletext, where each page was very text-heavy, graphics were created by making patterns with the text or rectangular blocks, creating pages took ages, and creating links between pages was very labour-intensive -- and which, at the end of the day, would be read by hardly anybody because there were not that many people who could access the system, or who could see the educational value in doing so.

In fact, our hats should go off to all pioneers because they are brave and lonely people. Brave, because they stake their reputations on what is little more than an article of faith; lonely because in a figurative sense so few people understand what they are trying to do, and in a literal sense because there are so few of them.

How do we move from having a few pioneers, to a much larger-scale adoption? Here are my thoughts on this.

Firstly, we need to ignore the people I regard as the Luddites. They may have valid arguments, but I think it's a waste of time and energy engaging with them. The people to concentrate on are the ones who are interested, and not quite sure what to do or where to start (which was the intended audience for Coming of Age).

Secondly, the tools need to become more mature. In the Horizon Project, for example, we use a wiki, YouTube, Airset (for scheduling), Elluminate (for live discussion), delicious (for bookmarking), and there may be others as far as I know. My view is this: you would never get any ordinary (and, dare I say it, rational) teacher to embark on such a project if they have to first learn about managing (note that I said "managing", not "using") these tools. If I want to create a table in a word processed document, I click on an icon labelled "Table"; I don't have to go to a special table application, create a table, and then somehow integrate it into the document. I know there is an issue about bloatware, with most products being over-featured for most people most of the time, but when it comes to practical, everyday, usage, people appreciate having the tool they need when and where they need it.

Thirdly, we have an obligation to think about things from the point of view of the ordinary teacher, by which I mean that we need to point out where Web 2.0 tools can deliver their aims and objectives. Much of the time I feel that that aspect is ignored, or somehow dismissed.

Fourthly, we need to stop deluding ourselves that there is a digital divide based on age. The conceptual framework of digital natives and digital immigrants is useful, but only up to a point. Most of the really pioneering people I know are in the 40s and 50s, and a lot of young people I know are pretty conservative. There always will be pioneers and non-pioneers, and thinking that the up-coming generation will adopt Web 2.0 tools and solve the sorts of issues we are currently grappling with, such as locked-down systems, banned resources and so on, just by dint of their age profile, is an effective way of avoiding these issues altogether.

Finally, we need advocates in all walks of life, and we need to stop being so isolationist. In a sense, the best argument to persuade school authorities that instant messaging is potentially a good thing is the fact that many businesses use it as part of their internal communications landscape. Businesses will expect to see schoolchildren leaving school with an ability to use tools like instant messaging. That, for some people, is a good enough reason for schools to not merely allow its use, but to require it.

In conclusion, a challenge for us is to find ways of spreading the use of Web 2.0 tools from the relatively small group of pioneers who have already dipped their toes in the water, to the much larger group of people who are standing on the beach wondering if they should. I hope to develop my thinking on this over the course of the next few months.

This article first appeared on the Technology and Learning blog.

© Terry Freedman Wed, 30 May 2007