Essay about web 2.0

UNIVERSIDAD AUTÓNOMA DEL ESTADO DE MÉXICO

FACULTAD DE LENGUAS

B.A. in language, major in English teaching.

Activity 1: Essay about web 2.0

by Lizeth Gama Villegas

25th June, 2015

 

Web 2.0 Takes On Colleges and Universities

Clearly, as we have been studying ICT and CALL are tools that teachers and students use to improve part of the teaching and learning process in many subject areas. Businesses have already seized opportunities to leverage this powerful transformation in innovative ways, and their expectations of students’ abilities to perform in technology-based environments are increasing.

This puts enormous pressure on colleges and universities to integrate new and evolving technologies into their academic programs that will improve student learning and prepare them for a dynamic, collaborative, and digitally-mediated world. With the tools and insights presented in this white paper, colleges and universities will be able to tap into Web 2.0 and evolving widgets in revolutionary ways.

This essay has the purpose to understand the fundamentals of Web 2.0, explore ways to implement Web 2.0 technologies into current academic applications and leverage Web 2.0 and rich media tools to attract, retain and prepare students for employment.

Certainty, information sharing and collaboration via rich media is reshaping the lives and behaviors of millions of people—and in no demographic is this more evident than today’s youth. The Internet's first mass market stage of development saw users going to the Internet to find information. It was pretty much a one-way experience, similar to going to the library to find a book. In contrast, Web 2.0 relies on user participation.

Web 2.0 is the current state of online technology as it compares to the early days of the Web, characterized by greater user interactivity and collaboration, more pervasive network connectivity and enhanced communication channels.

One of the most significant differences between Web 2.0 and the traditional World Wide Web (WWW, retroactively referred to as Web 1.0) is greater collaboration among Internet users, content providers and enterprises. The social nature of Web 2.0 is another major difference between it and the original, static Web. Increasingly, websites enable community-based input, interaction, content-sharing and collaboration. Types of social media sites and applications include forums, microblogging, social networking, social bookmarking, social curation, and wikis.

By integrating Web 2.0 applications into standard curricula, colleges and universities can harness and capitalize off the power of today’s technologies. Several have already tapped into the early incarnation of these trends, including distance-based learning and Web-based classroom instruction, and still others are implementing social networking, wikis, and blogs into a variety of learning experiences—with advantageous results.

This whitepaper demonstrates the enormous value of applying Web 2.0-based technologies and emerging widgets to academic program development. Colleges and universities that integrate these tools into course content will flourish in today’s knowledge-based economy by attracting and retaining more students, engaging with them in revolutionary new ways, and preparing them for success in an increasingly digitized workplace.

Marc Prensky describes today's students as digital natives who have functioned in a digital environment for most of their lives; as a result, technologies that faculty and staff typically see as revolutionary are routine for today's entering college students.

Net Generation students arrive at their universities as experienced multitaskers, accustomed to using text messaging, telephones, and e-mail while searching the Internet and watching television. They are ready for multimedia learning to be delivered on a flexible learning schedule, one that is not tied to a set time and place.

Over the last decade, the learning paradigm has seen a shift from the behaviorist approach to constructivism, discovery and collaborative learning. Web 2.0 features provide the technological basis to implement these approaches. While it’s clear that colleges and universities must tap into these new and emerging technologies, it’s important that they maintain a balance between freedom and control. The trick is in finding the right combination of Web 2.0 tools that underscore the educational initiatives of each college or university. To accomplish this, institutions will need to consider all of these solutions:

1. Blogs

2. Podcasts

3. RSS

4. Widgets

5. Wikis

6. Video Sharing

7. Mashups

Educators now need to be aware of social networking sites since so many college students have embraced their capabilities. Some faculty members do incorporate Facebook in tentative yet innovative ways. For example, one instructor uses Facebook as a publicity vehicle for his study-abroad trips (Lemuel 2006). Another uses it as a venue for advertising events and then gives students an assignment asking them to analyze the site.

College instructors are also using other Web 2.0 applications in innovative ways. As noted by Bryan Alexander, social bookmarking sites such as del.icio.us facilitate a new kind of collaborative research since "finding people with related interests can magnify one's work by learning from others or by leading to new collaborations"; moreover, the user-based tagging afforded by such sites "can offer new perspectives on one's research, as clusters of tags reveal patterns (or absences) not immediately visible". In turn, social writing platforms such as wikis and Google Docs, which allow two or more people to edit a document in real time on the Internet, can be integrated into coursework. Blogs can be used to expand course activities beyond the four walls of the classroom, so students are writing for a worldwide audience instead of only for classmates and the instructor.

Colleges are also using Web 2.0 outside of the instructional context. Campus administrators and police harvest information from online discussions and postings to monitor possible illegal activities and to keep a finger on the pulse of the campus.

In turn, an initiative at Duke University may serve as a particularly notable example of Web 2.0 innovation. Duke made headlines in 2004 when it gave iPods to incoming freshmen as part of its multiyear Duke Digital Initiative to "stimulate creative uses of digital technology in academic and campus life".

Tufts University combined Google's mapping technology with institution of higher education (IHE) information to create a mashup complete with "satellite images, informative links, [and] category searches" in order to provide "a resource that enables prospective and current students, staff, faculty, campus visitors, community members, and others to explore the campus online and locate buildings and services".

Duke has developed a number of supported educational uses for iPods, many of which include interactive elements typical of Web 2.0. Students create or record lectures, discussions, interviews, and presentations and then upload audio or image files to shared course space. Instructors record everything from interviews and oral exams to classroom lectures and download student contributions from the course space to their own iPods.

In conclusion, to move our educational practices forward, we will need an understanding of our users and their changing behavior, a willingness to experiment with new business models, and an appreciation of hybrid organizations that take advantage of skills contributed by various players with diverse backgrounds.

The future is teeming with opportunities to capture Web 2.0 tools that can dramatically refine, reshape, and revolutionize student learning. When integrated into standard curricula and academic programs, colleges and universities will realize enormous benefits, such as increased collaboration between and among students and faculty, inexpensive ways of employing experiential and hands-based learning that boost knowledge retention and prepare students for collaborative working environments, and position institutions of higher learning as leaders in innovation.

Colleges and universities will have to take a good, hard look at current organizational structures and determine how hierarchical chains can be broken with carefully selected Web 2.0 tools that facilitate open, integrated channels of communication and learning. It’s not the technology, the tools, or even the content that defines what students will walk away with upon graduation. Ultimately, it is the way that they learn and how they are able to apply that knowledge that will redefine knowledge-based organizations, businesses, and the world in which we live. Web 2.0 is no longer a wave of the future; it is the regeneration of teaching and learning that’s central to our lives today—and it’s up to colleges and universities to seize its potential.

REFERENCES

Y Combinated (2005) Web 2.0 Retrieved June 25, 2015, from http://www.paulgraham.com/web20.html#f1n

Srinivasan Venkat (n.d) WEB 2.0/3.0: Emerging Widgets and the Next Generation of Higher Education Applications Retrieved June 25, 2015, from https://cdns3.trainingindustry.com/media/3114049/niit_wp_web2.pdf

Thomson John (2015) Web 2.0 Takes On Colleges And Universities: The Dawn Of Education 2.0. Retrieved June 25, 2015, from http://www.masternewmedia.org/news/2007/04/20/web_20_takes_on_colleges.htm

Rouse Margaret (2015) - What is Web 2.0 ? Definition from WhatIs.com. (n.d.). Retrieved June 25, 2015, from http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/Web-20-or-Web-2