The survival of higher education (2): Changing times

This is a continuation from yesterday's post on changing roles, disruptive innovation and the survival of higher education.

Changing Times

It is now time to take stock. My two keynotes were conceived, written and presented over a decade ago in 2000, at a time when the Web was still in its infancy. I was certainly speaking for a time before the advent of what is now referred to as Web 2.0 or the ‘social web’. In this paper, having revisited my previous speeches I'm going to try to gaze once more into the near future in an attempt to determine what education might look like in the light of the technological developments that comprise Web 2.0. I will attempt to contextualise these changes at the level of both organisation and individual, to provide a picture of how universities and teachers might manage their business in the coming decade. Once again, I will do so based upon my knowledge and experience gained from a career in which research has been central to my work. As my starting point I want to examine the phenomenon that is Web 2.0 and provide some examples of current pedagogical practice using the Social Web. I will then speculate on the current changes in practice that might emerge, both for the institution and the teacher. Finally, I will suggest that there are five key objectives to achieve if universities are to achieve success in the use of learning technologies in the future.

The Changing Web (2.0) 

So what exactly is Web 2.0? This is a contested label for new and emergent properties that are found on the Web. It is a complex network of dynamic resources that we all acknowledge is constantly changing to adapt to the growing demand for entertainment, communication and access to knowledge. Debate centres upon whether the emerging social applications constitute a sea change or revolution in the Web (cf. van Dijk, 2002) or simply another phase in its relentless progress. Personally, I find myself in agreement with Brian Winston (2003), preferring to view social applications as a facet of gradual evolution rather than symptoms of sudden revolution. Essentially, the Web has become more social. As with most other technology innovations, Web 2.0 applications have grown out of the need for people to connect together, share experiences and knowledge, enhance their experiences and open up new possibilities in learning. The Social Web is comprised of software that enables people to both read from, and write onto web spaces. It is literally the ‘architecture of participation’ (O'Reilly, 2004; Barsky and Purdon, 2006) and demands active engagement as a natural facet of its character (Kamel Boulos and Wheeler, 2007).

Web 2.0 tools include popular applications such as blogs, wikis and podcasting; social networking sites such as Facebook; photo and video sharing services such as Flickr and YouTube; social tagging, aggregation and curation of content; the use of Twitter to connect with, and create massive personal learning networks; and concepts such as the folksonomy, Darwikianism and the wisdom of crowds (Kamel Boulos, Maramba and Wheeler, 2006). Finally, we cannot afford to ignore the growing influence of mobile phones and apps as a disruptive force and the capability they have of enabling any time, any place learning.

A Social Web that supports learning 

Staff at the University of Plymouth have been using Web 2.0 (social web) tools in teacher education for the several years and have attempted to qualify their use in a number of areas of learner support including shared online spaces (Wheeler et al, 2008) and blogs (Wheeler and Lambert-Heggs, 2008). The essential premise underpinning the use of any Social Web application is that over a period of time it genuinely becomes self-supporting, and that the students will enjoy the freedom to produce their own content and study pathways. The problem with this is that students may not always be as accurate or fastidious in their content generation as they could be, and may need guidance on the pathway they choose to take. However, there is evidence that students begin to support each other when they share the same online space and have mutual goals to achieve. One of the most popular and easy to use tools in the wiki – a shared website which anyone can edit.

We quickly discovered that wikis are so open as to cause problems if some form of scaffolding or structure is not created for students. We therefore designed a number of activities for the wiki. One of the first learning activities was to generate a set of rules about acceptable and unacceptable behaviour online. Students proposed and discussed their rules, which included the banning of offensive language and racist comments. Known as ‘wikiquette’ (wiki etiquette), this popular activity was subscribed to by all of the groups, and the result was a consensus of rules over which the entire group had ownership. There is no evidence that any of the rules were ever broken, but if any wikiquette rules had been transgressed, it would have been likely that the rest of the group would have taken action to sanction the perpetrator.

Tomorrow: Part 3: The Social Web

References

Barsky, E. and Purdon, M. (2006). Introducing Web 2.0: Social networking and social bookmarking for health librarians. Journal of the Canadian Health Libraries Association 27, 65-67.

Kamel Boulos, M. N., Maramba, I. and Wheeler, S. (2006). Wikis, blogs and podcasts: a new generation of Web-based tools for virtual collaborative clinical practice and education. BMC Medical Education 6, 41.
O'Reilly, T. (2004). What is Web 2.0. O'Reilly Media. Retrieved 7 February, 2014.

van Dijk, J. (2002). The Network Society. London: Sage.
Wheeler, S., Yeomans, P. and Wheeler, D. (2008). The good, the bad and the wiki: Evaluating student generated content as a collaborative learning tool, British Journal of Educational Technology, 39(6), 987-995.
Wheeler, S. and Lambert-Heggs, W. (2008) Connecting distance learners and their mentors using blogs: The MentorBlog Project, Quarterly Review of Distance Education, 10(4), 3-17.
Winston, B. (2003). Media Technology and Society: A History: From the Telegraph to the Internet. London: Routledge.

Photo by Felix Burton on Wikimedia Commons


The survival of higher education (2): Changing times by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.