Events in Silicon Valley have, traditionally, had a trickle-down effect on teaching and learning. But with the arrival of the internet and teachers who write blogs regularly, the valley is beginning to have a more immediate influence on education. One idea being banded about the "blogosphere" is that we are experiencing the second phase of the development of the web or "web 2.0", with the explosion of new web services, applications, and business models that are helping to reshape the net.
If the early version of the web took a "top-down" approach to content, which consisted mainly of standalone and static web pages that were hard to update, web 2.0 takes a more "bottom-up" approach - where web services and applications allow users to publish content without the need to write code and exploit the network's potential to support greater social interaction and collaboration. As a result, we are seeing a renaissance of Tim Berners-Lee's original vision of a read/write web through the creation of what Tim O'Reilly (a US internet pioneer who was among the first to popularise the web 2.0 idea), calls an "architecture of participation".
Like the web itself, the early promise of e-learning - that of empowerment - has not been fully realised. The experience of e-learning for many has been no more than a hand-out published online, coupled with a simple multiple-choice quiz. Hardly inspiring, let alone empowering. But by using these new web services, e-learning has the potential to become far more personal, social and flexible.
Rather than being based on cumbersome (and often expensive) virtual learning environments, e-learning 2.0 should adopt what David Weinberger, author and fellow at Harvard's Berkman Institute for Internet and Society, calls a "small pieces, loosely joined" approach, combining the use of discrete but complimentary tools and web services, based on "open standards", which can be made to work together. Many teachers are doing this through use of web logs or "blogs" (a form of online micropublishing, typically of personal thoughts and weblinks), wikis - web publishing software that lets users create and edit web pages using a standard web browser - and other forms of social software, as well as various digital media and devices - think podcasting.
Personal publishing
Blogs remove the technical barriers to writing and publishing online, and the journal format encourages bloggers to keep a record of their own thinking over time. Blogs also facilitate critical feedback by letting readers add comments. These could be from teachers, students, or the wider community.
For students, a blog can be used as a living record of their learning: a place to pose questions, publish work in progress or provide links to (and comments on) relevant web resources.
Teachers who are subject specialists may want to start their own subject-based blog where they can provide up-to-date information and commentary on their subject area, as well as posting questions and assignments, and linking to relevant news stories and websites. Media studies teacher Pete Fraser runs one such blog (using Google's free blogging service blogger.com) for his students at Long Road sixth-form college, in Cambridge. Visit http://longroadmedia.blogspot.com/
Collaborative publishing
A key theme of many web 2.0 applications is that they harness the collective intelligence of users, and this is particularly true of wikis. As with blogs, wiki software makes it possible to publish a website with very little technical knowledge but puts a greater emphasis on collaborative rather than personal publishing. Every wiki entry has an "edit this page" button so that users can not only add new content but make changes to existing pages.
Perhaps the best-known use of a wiki is the web-based encyclopedia, Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org), which is authored and maintained by a thriving online community. Critics argue that because there is no central editor, the validity and accuracy of its entries varies greatly. In its defence the wiki community points out that if a user spots a mistake, they are free to correct it for themselves, and that any vandalism is usually eradicated within five minutes. As an introduction to wikis, why not have students (perhaps as part of a history lesson) research and write a missing entry then see how the wikipedia community evaluates that entry and what changes they make?
Folksonomy
Folksonomy is another example of the way in which the web 2.0 attempts to harness the collective intelligence of its users. The word "folksonomy" is a spin on the word "taxonomy" and refers to the collaborative way in which information is being categorised on the web. Instead of using a centralised form of classification, users are encouraged to assign freely chosen keywords to pieces of information or data, a process known as tagging. Web 2.0 services that use tagging include those designed to allow users to publish and share various media, such as photos (www.flickr.com) or videos (www.youtube.com), as well as most blog software, where each entry can be assigned keywords.
Delicious (http://del.icio.us/) is a "social bookmarks manager" that allows users to create their own personal collection of weblinks and which (because they are stored online) can be accessed from any computer connected to the net. Each bookmark is given a short description and tagged with keywords, and collections can be shared. All teachers and students would benefit from using a social bookmarking service.
Media and devices
The use of digital media in schools has been around for years but the sharing of finished work has tended to be isolated within the school. A central theme of web 2.0 is to make publishing and sharing content as simple as possible. Coupled with the recent explosion of portable media devices such as video-capable mobile phones and MP3 players (see www.ipodined.org), this means that teachers and students now have many more opportunities to publish and share digital media.
Content aggregation
Perhaps the most important element of web 2.0 is that it offers the kind of connectivity to bring all these disparate elements together. For example, using an online RSS reader, such as bloglines.com, it's possible to track and be alerted to new and relevant content across a range of web services and applications. Updated content could include a student's new blog entry or comment, changes to a project wiki, newly published media, or useful weblinks recently discovered by a teacher.
It is this level of integration and participation that is driving the web 2.0 revolution - a phenomenon offering a very different approach to e-learning.
· Stephen O'Hear is a fellow for the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (www.ohear.net)
Weblink
Tim O'Reilly, internet pioneer: www.oreilly.com/oreilly/tim_bio.html