Thing 5: Web 2.0/School 2.0

 “We can no longer ask our children to live in a world where they are immersed in technology in all parts of their lives except school.  We must rewire education or we risk losing this generation of media-immersed, tech-savvy students.”

“Welcome to the iGeneration!” by Larry Rosen (2010).

For the past year or so I’ve heard the term Web 2.0 tossed around and always thought it meant a faster WWW or maybe an improved WWW.  I am always being encouraged to buy new software or upgrade my existing software to the “new and improve 2.0 version” (3.0, 4.0, 4.1, 4.2, etc.).  A recent tutorial video from Atomic Learning, entitled “What is Web 2.0?” helped clear up some of my misconceptions about the term.  Web 1.0 refers to the “Read Only Web” where the web was used primarily to store information and consumers used the web to find information on just about anything.   Basically the web of the 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s.  Web 2.0 refers to the web as a “Read/Write” tool, where you are still able to find information on the web (read) but now literally anyone can put something on the web (write) for the whole world to see, view, listen to or watch.  Now we have blogs, podcasts, Wikipedia, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc where anyone, anywhere, and any age can post something to the web.

School 2.0 refers to using this new, more social technology, of Web 2.0 in school.  I found a great quote in an article entitled “Web 2.0: A Guide for Educators” by Susan McLester (2007) “for education not to step up and maximize these resources for teaching, learning, and driving innovation is to risk becoming marginalized as a viable influence in helping to shape the 21st century” (para. 5).  Schools need to teach the skills that the job market of tomorrow requires.  I grew up believing that the purpose of education was to equip our students with the necessary skills and knowledge to become productive members of society.  If this is the case, it is imperative upon us the teachers to use Web 2.0 in the classroom.  In a book I read this summer entitled Redefining Literacy 2.0 by David Warlick, he quotes a researcher that states that something like 90% of the jobs that the children entering 1st grade today will have upon graduation, haven’t even been created yet (jobs in internet security and such).  We increasing need to use the tools of technology that our students will be increasingly using in the job market of tomorrow, and in many cases are already using outside the classroom today.  O'Brien and Scharber (2010) have an interesting perspective that the greatest challenge to introducing technology into the classroom is with teacher, in an article they wrote “Teaching Old Dogs New Tricks: The Luxury of Digital Abundance.”

“In the 21st century, literacy involves not just reading and comprehending the text in front of you.  It now includes a range of skills to find, navigate, access, decode, evaluate, and organize the information from a globally networked landscape.  Almost all of the information that our students use in their future will be viewed with some type of information device (a computer), and it will come from a global electronic library that will be vast, largely unorganized and unmanaged, and produced from a bewildering variety of perspectives.  If all our children learn to do is read, they will not be literate.” (p 18-19)

RedefiningLiteracy 2.0. by David Warlick (2010).