Web 2 Article

In recent years, online learning portals have become way for facilitators of education to make use of the Internet for connecting teaching and learning. Having been used in the Australian tertiary sector for at least the last ten years (footnote), secondary schools are now exploring their potential as an adjunct to – and perhaps substitute for – face-to-face classroom teaching. With easily mastered web 2.0 applications like Wikispaces, Beebo, Myspace and many others now ubiquitous, the nature of the web has shifted. Prior to the so-called ‘information revolution’ of the mid-1990s, the internet may have easily been passed off as a complex network of data sources which were nonetheless relatively static, being controlled and vetted by professionals and enthusiasts with a technical background – thus being irrelevant to the concerns of many. However, it is clear that the complex nature of the web is now more evident in the vast array of social networks which stem from the ‘read/write’ concept behind Web 2.0: that absolutely anyone can become authors, editors and publishers of ideas, sharing these with the world community. Furthermore, conventional authorship is now problematic, with texts that are multiply-authored and ideas that are collaboratively worked and re-worked, through the networking of millions of minds continually building upon ideas. Because conventional authorship is bypassed, authority on the web now rests with the communities created by and around the millions of blogs, wikipedia pages, and social spaces, all of which fundamentally operate democratically and are essentially centred around trust, good will and equality. The alleged instances of the Australian Federal Department of Defence altering the Wikipedia pages concerned with the “children overboard” affair highlight the power of online communities to hold false or misleading ideas up to scrutiny, and to continually work towards objective truths which are democratically determined by all people, not merely representatives in government acting with vested interests. If the barrage of media assaults which followed the discovery of Howard’s so-called meddlers can be said to have rattled the cages of Liberal Party offices, then here is certainly a positive twentyfirst century step in relation to the advice uttered so eloquently by Hugo Weaving playing the role of the mysterious V in V for Vendetta: ‘People shouldn’t fear their governments – governments should fear their people.’ In a similarly eloquent fashion, though, many education theorists frequently lament the ‘modern’ classroom – a parody of itself – bearing more resemblance to the industrial factory floor and being no different to how it was in the nineteenth century (the opposite to the ‘good old days,’ perhaps?). Even if suggestions like these are regarded as partly true, it is possible to argue that teaching vacuums do indeed exist and in a classroom with little more than lecture-style seating and a blackboard – or one in which little more than these are made use of – it is easy to teach within such a vacuum. Nonetheless, the addition of ICT to the already overburdened compliancedriven agendas in education systems around the world has led to technology being a highly sensitive area for the ageing teaching profession. A privatised classroom, low accountability, compartmentalised disciplines and limited professional development are all factors which – along with the ‘vacuum’ – place the humble teacher poorly in the arena of online learning. So what happens when we try to reconcile the incredible gulf between

regimented teaching practices of the past and the infinite potential of twenty-first century learning? We realise, I would argue, that these two concepts are as irreconcilable as military dictatorships are to democracies. Continuing the traditional teacher model of the autocrat upon whom rests the authority to disseminate ‘correct’ information is increasingly making school irrelevant in the lives of young people. Arguably what makes technology a particularly sensitive issue for most teachers is the fact that it cannot possibly be mastered in the way that the conventional teaching of subject content previously could. The frustration is made all the more worse when, to our disbelief, our young people adeptly learn the microscopic ins and outs of using the web for more purposes than many pre-generation Y people ever imagined! Of course, to paint the picture that secondary teaching has, up to now, been little more than a series of lectures and an ongoing case of ‘copy this off the board’ would be wrong. On the contrary, good evidence exists that many alternative teaching methods in existence well before the Information Revolution have fostered teaching and learning approaches highly compatible with the democratic nature of learning in the domain of web 2.0. The Project for the Enhancement of Effective Learning, originating in Victoria in 1985 is a particularly pertinent case in point. PEEL articulates twelve principles of teaching and learning, some of which could be said to run counter to traditional teaching, or at least are not well developed in traditional learning environments:

“..we need to be modelling how to interpret, use and evaluate many of the tools now available at a sophisticated level as part of our own learning, almost before student needs are considered”. (Michael) -

tech is dazzling – don’t know what’s possible and we are easily caught up with minor technicalities focus on CENet –