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.
Part of the problem is learning the language of ICT adn Web 2.0. Sometimes we can learn to use some of the tools without knowing all the lingo, but I'd rather reach a certain level of information literacy that enables to to survive in the "Web 2.0 world".
ReplyDeleteRebekah-I agree with you that the problem of access is one that we do need to think about before we incorporate Web 2.0 technology. It's important to realise that not everyone has a laptop or iPhone (like me!) let alone the connections needed to use it.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you totally, all students must be able to have access to as well as understand how to use Web2.0 technologies if they are to complete a task using such technologies. I haven't yet had such an issue but can clearly remember the occassional student who have handed in written work rather than typed work as well as some international students who clearly had trouble relating to the topic matter as it was outside of their (cultural) experience. Like you I can't afford to think that all students are the same even having something seemingly fundamental as the same level of techno-skills.
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