I’m taking a class this week – Using ICT in a Tertiary Environment. It’s a professional development workshop for university teachers who want to learn how to better incorporate information and communications technologies into their courses. Our first homework assignment is to write a blog post on ‘Higher education in a Web 2.0 World: What does the changing environment mean to you?’ This is my blog (actually it’s a very long question).
In 2009 research by The Committee of Inquiry into the Changing Learner Experience found that the most widely recognised types of Web 2.0 activity were: blogging, conversing, media sharing, online gaming and virtual worlds, social bookmarking, social networking, syndication, trading and wikis. Despite this finding that many of our students use Web 2.0 tools every day, most of these technologies have struggled to make their way into university curriculums.
Perhaps it isn’t surprising that universities, where the wheels of curriculum development tend to turn more slowly (we sometimes undergo years of careful introspective reflection or navel-gazing to the lay person before taking any action), are still struggling to grasp the uses and implications of these technologies. Consider this…
Google only began crawling the web in September 1998 (and went public in August 2004); Blogger.com started blogging in August 1999; Wikipedia’s first collaboration was in January 2001; LinkedIn’s network expanded in May 2003; MySpace fans appeared in August 2003; Facebook friends discovered how much they liked each other in February 2004 when they also started sharing photos on Flickr; YouTube’s first broadcast was in February 2005 and Twitter commenced tweeting in 2006.
Some of my students graduating this year started their degrees before anyone had heard about Twitter! In fairness, these are if not new then at least young technologies. But aren’t universities supposed to be on the cutting edge of new developments – the experimental playgrounds of industries? Why is it that most (not all) academics have been so slow to apply these technologies in their teaching? The wheels of curriculum development don’t turn that slowly! Why are many reluctant?
MIT Professor Henry Jenkins (2006) wrote that many of the Web 2.0 technologies rely on what he called a “collective intelligence – the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal.” In a collective intelligence environment:
“Like-minded individuals gather online to embrace common enterprises, which often involve access and processing information. In such a world, everyone knows something, nobody knows everything, and what any one person knows can be tapped by the group as a whole.”
This concept of collective intelligence scares a lot of academics. We don’t trust it. It’s the reason we discourage (outright forbid) the use of Wikipedia. Collective intelligences are uncontrolled environments, open to manipulation and chaotic. They’re too much work!
However, when you stop and think about it, universities by their very nature are participatory cultures – collective intelligences – researchers and teachers collaborating together. Students too are required in many courses to complete group work.
Web 2.0 tools are merely that – tools. Extensions of the blackboard, the tutorial room and the cafeteria.
It’s in uncontrolled environments where imagination, ideas and inventions are free to flourish – and yes chaos too. But anything worth doing involves risk and hard work.
Jenkins also wrote that media convergence is “an ongoing process, occurring at various intersections of media technologies, industries, content and audiences” and “not an end state.” Perhaps there’s still hope for university lecturers?