The changing environment of higher education in a Web 2.0 world offers many exciting possibilities and of course many significant challenges and questions. The readings about Web 2.0 were all interesting; I had never considered before the possibility that students may not want to use Web 2.0 outside of a social context. There were also a number of assumptions made about who learners were. Increasingly learners are not just young people who have just fallen out of high school; our learners are often older adults from a variety of technological backgrounds ranging from extremely savvy “bungee jumpers” to those who wear bomb disposal suits before touching the computer’s on switch and in all probability still think a Blackberry is what you eat with a pancake. There are also assumptions about access; not all students have access to Web 2.0 technologies and not all students have access to sufficient bandwidth for many applications and have limited access to technical support if things go wrong. Recently I had problems with an external student handing in a recorded presentation because she first had problems accessing a camera and then was only able to use an old style VCR type and then was unable to transfer the tape from the camera to a readable format (I am not explaining this well but the key message was “she couldn’t get it to work”).
The key message for me is that if I want to use Web 2.0 I need to have plans in place to overcome these barriers and need to ensure that I scaffold any tasks well. For example if I am going to have students produce a blog as an assessment tool I need to make sure they first have all the support they need to actually set up the blog before we even worry about what they actually produce.
