Personal Blogs

I'm not sure I should be posting because I have only just finished reading the TLRP-TEL 2008 Report and it has profoundly irritated me.  Maybe I'm misreading it but it comes across as a sales pitch for educational software providers. 

 Some of the statements place the technology above or at least equal to the pedagogy in importance (For example: 'undertaking effective pedagogic design in virtual worlds involves recognising and selecting from the various offers of the particular application ...whilst bearing in mind the needs of the educational context..' Carr).  This seems to me to be the wrong way round - if we design to fit the technology we take on board the assumptions and preferences of software designers (such as the idea that file structures are inevitable and necessary).  This is a concern when none of the Web 2.0 technologies have been designed for education.

The report is also prone to sweeping statements unsuported by authority - the sort of thing that my students loose marks for. One example of this is the comment that there has been an increase in the 'sheer number of internet users' (with no reference to the time period of the increase in question or any reference).  The UK statistics suggest that internet penetration has plateaued with no significant increase since 2004.

It also appears to accept the 'digital native' hypothesis without any real question - a brief nod to the doubters but no mention of the studies that suggest that only a relatively small percentage of students actually have the expertise and immersion in technologies that the authors appear to assume is universal.

Oh yes, and casual references to 'evolution' of technologies for education as if Web 2.0 were a natural, self regulating biological system instead of a nexus of commercial interests.  There may be parallels but this analogy seems to conceal the social and political context.

Final grump -

Ways of developing ‘cultures of trust’ between learners and schools with regard to their use of technology should be encouraged. This could be achieved by allowing learners to negotiate the nature of their internet use in school

Have these guys ever been anywhere near an inner city secondary school?

  The 'nature' of the internet use, if unrestricted, would be downloading hard core, playing games and on-line purchase of Viagra etc for re-sale.  The rules are there for internet access for the same reasons that there are rules of class room conduct - if there were not there would be chaos dictated by the most disruptive.

Sorry - ranting but hopefully with some relevant points.

Vikki

Weller suggests that decentralisation, democratisation and bottom-up processes characterise the world of Web 2.0. Using your reading in the course thus far, provide one or two examples that would support this claim and one or two examples that would modify or counter this claim.

This paper seemed almost naive in its enthusiasm. Web 2.0 is not divorced from the commercial realities of the rest of the world. The technology, knowledge, skills and confidence to create content on the Web seem likely to remain confined to the already (relatively) wealthy and well educated.

As I thought of each supporting example I realised that it contained a counter-example as well.

For instance, citizen journalism should be the ideal example of 'democratised' creation of content.  Except that each site has editorial policies and guidelines, is subject to legal and other regulation (PCC for example) and can ultimately be shut down by the corporate owners of the site and its supporting technology (for example Reporter.co.za).

Wikipedia is another such example - except that the collaborative creation of content has proved so contentious and the need for authority so great that the operators are considering how to regulate this.

Delicious again should be the ideal example - a case in point of 'filtering on the way out' (Weller and Dalziel, 2009) to give authority to a source (rather than peer review etc before publication). However despite having 5.3 million users as at 2008 it is not clear how many of those users generate the majority of the content.  The lack of standardisation of tags means that it is a rather hit and miss means of providing an indication of reliability of information.

I may be being cynical (lawyer's disease - sorry) but I think 'outsourcing' is a better word than 'democratisation' here.  Corporations have used a model that enables them to generate content, site traffic and revenue without paying for the labour that creates it.

How all this relates to education is another matter and I feel a rant coming on so I'm going to stop now.

Vikki