Sociable Technologies and Education

"Web 2.0 is structured around open programming interfaces that allow widespread participation. Increased user contirbution leads to the growth of 'collective intelligence', and re-usable dynamic content. Such engagement with content promotes a sense of commuity, empowerment and ownership....Web 2.0 also encourages significnatly more interaction between users, a feature that many theorists argue is vital in e-learning. Interaction encourages deeper and more active learning engagement, builds communities of learning and enables feedback from tutors to students."

In their article on Web 2.0 technology and its uses for education Maged N.Kamel Boulos and Steve Wheelert provide a useful critique of how Web 2.0 can assist in building social learning environments.

They provide a helpful overview of the different types of Web 2.0 technology and their applications for creating a more dynamic learning enviroment.

They also demonstrate how Web 2.0 is producing a different set of outcomes and driving a new way of thinking about the internet and learning technology compared to that of Web 1.0. They are not suggesting that web 1.0 is oboslete, in fact they suggest "Web 2.0...provides many useful extension to Web 1.0 rather than fully replacing it."(16)


The way that Web 2.0 does differ from previous technologies is "Web 2.0 is primarily about people...the sociable technologies of Web 2.0 have the potential to promote active and engaged learning, where participants themselves construct their own knowledge through social interaction and exploration. " (17-18)



The sociable nature of Web 2.0 is clearly applicable to learning in CoP's. Yet one of issues raised is that information genearated and catergorised on the Web 2.0 is from the bottom up. Tools like social tagging are very democratic yet can also be unstable and inefficient. This suggests that while the organic nature of user generated information and classification is of great benefit to CoP's, there may also need to be some agreeing to norms or protocols and top down thinking in order to maximise the storage and retrieval of the collated information generated. Maybe this process could be used as another means of establishing community identity by the way information is organised and labelled.



Resource
Boulos, M. N. K., & Wheeler, S. (2007). The emerging Web 2.0 social software: an enabling suite of sociable technologies in health and health care education. Retrieved 5/12/07 from http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1471-1842.2007.00701.x?cookieSet=1