Development 2.0 - Education 2.0

8/9/2019 Development 2.0 - Education 2.0

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Introduction on Development 2.0:

Development 2.0 is something which is based on Web 2.0, ICT and other

information technologies which is or had an impact on the growth of the various sectors

like education, human life, economy, etc. This impact has been very well explained by

Heeks R. in his work where he explains how the overall IT-enabled models transformed

the processes and structures of development. It is changing the fundamental assumptions

of international development. In 1998, less than one person in developing countries out of

100 was an internet subscriber but 10 years later it changed to 22, similarly for mobile

phone subscribers it changed from 2 to 55. What this has done is due to the introduction

of new information technologies the poor people have access to information. IT can help

by linking to a much wider social world through information exchanges. A very good

example of a website is given www.babajob.com in India a networking site which

employers post their low-skilled jobs on, to reach the people who do not have internet

access they are sent an SMS as job alerts. Coming to education the One-Laptop-Per-Child

project is a part of vast social experiment which might catalyze many Development 2.0

initiatives. (Heeks R, 2010). ICT is considered as a vital role in the globalisation of

processes because it comprises of various technologies from mobile phones and laptops

to complex systems. ICT is the standard move towards virtual and knowledge-based

societies, where virtuality generally means watching plasma, playing with the mice,

surfing the web or talking on the mobile phones (Silva L. and Westrup C. ,2008).

The aim of this work is to understand the role of technologies in the education sector,

precisely the role of Web 2.0. Technology helps to negate the importance of physical

presence and make education available perhaps to every child in every corner of the

country. The technology has always been lagged in adoption by the education sector but

it is a fact that the next generation that are targeted would be very tech-savvy. The many

interactive methods that are present make the whole learning process very interesting and

also very easy to students to understand. Even the future teachers can be said would be

very much technical friendly living on advance technologies. The content available to

students on the internet is so vast and all at their fingertips. By the introduction of

technology (Web 2.0) it can reduce the pain of the parents of the students by schools


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providing the service to pay the fee online and also can view their childs daily report

online. This will make the overall experience of the parents very pleasant rather pain.

One can implement a system which can integrate all functions of the school and give the

opportunity to multiply geographically at other locations (Joseph F., 2009).

Role of Development 2.0 in the education sector or Education 2.0:

The role of Web 2.0 has a profound impact on the education, it has changed the

way students learn and also give them an opportunity to also learn independently, this has

also changed the teaching methods over the years. As stated by Westrup 2010 the

combination of Web 2.0 and ICT4D creates Education 2.0. Web 2.0 encompasses a

variety of different meanings that include an increased emphasis on user generated

content, data and content sharing and collaborative effort, together with the use of

various kinds of social software, new ways of interacting with web-based applications,

and the use of the web as a platform for generating, re-purposing and consuming

content. According to Franklin T., et al the implications of Web 2.0 for education will

ultimately be viewed in the context of media and technology convergence with respect to

the following:

The contemporaneous growth of Web 2.0 co-occurs with increased mediaconvergence, particularly in respect of broadband communications, telephony

and the broadcast media.

While professionally produced and edited media are likely to persist we will see

the broadcast media increasingly adopting Web 2.0 technologies, with greater

audience participation and audience created content. In parallel we will also see

an increasing number of channels funded in diverse ways.

The increased bandwidth offered by 3G telephony will encourage a move from

the desktop and the desktop browser to mobile devices and browsers. Content

will be created, shared and consumed on mobile devices.

Ubiquitous computing that is always around us, and always on, will change our

everyday digital and media environments, mediating the world in new ways.


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Indication of social presence will increase, and will help mediate people in

different ways.

The Web 2.0 has a large range of systems for the educational applications which are

grouped together and labelled as social software which enhances the group processes.

Some of the examples of social software are as follows:

Blogs It is a system which allows writing and publishing it on the web in a time-

ordered method, some of the examples of blogs to education are given below.

1. Bloggers can use their personal blogs to build up a collection of

writings of interrelated knowledge through posts and comments which

could be read by anyone as its presence being on the World Wide

Web.

2. Teachers can also use blogs to make some announcements related to

the course and also give feedbacks to student on their produced.

3. Blogs can also be used with syndication technologies to easily track

the new posts and comments.

Wikis A wiki is a public domain on which people can write an article which is a set

of interlinked web-pages and publish it online. This article can be edited anytime by the

author. A very good and popular example of this system is Wikipedia.

1. Wikis can be used to create explanatory notes by teachers.

2. Wikis can also be used in class projects.

3. Wikis can also utilized by teachers as materials for certain writing

activities to the students, they can provide page structure, hints for the

desired content and finally can provide feedback on the students

content.

4. Certain areas of wiki can be flagged by students to be addressed and

then give feedback to each other on their writing.


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Social networking and social presence systems These systems allow people to link

to each other for various purposes but we will see how it can be used for educational

purpose:

1. The University of Brighton The university implemented Elgg in September

2006 which was integrated with their existing VLE and MIS systems, hence

they could use the same automated student registration procedures and course

communities procedures. Pretty soon it gained popularity among the students

and staff and they started using it as an online social community and also for

shared academic interests. Now it has been not just used for social activities

but more formally within the course and modules where people share valuable

information, comment irrespective of the course and perhaps build an all-

round development irrespective of their field of study. Elgg has been replaced

to the Blackboard system the university had as it gives the students an

opportunity to participate on a higher degree, use it for their personal

development planning and create e-portfolios. Students can also consolidate

material from their MySpace accounts (nearly 25% of students have MySpace

accounts). An example of learning in this system includes media students who

upload their videos and then use the system to comment on each others

videos. It also helps in enhancing the services provided to the students, there

have been students who were on the verge to quit their courses but by

blogging their problems they were addressed by the student services and

provided the necessary support. A single problem with this system is that it

has not been embraced by the experts and professionals who vitally contribute

to the course and modules because of some inappropriate use of the system

initially, like some postings and inappropriate sales activity was also done

once (Franklin T. et al, 2007).

As we have seen a few examples of how technology has been implemented in educational

institutions now we need to address how the teachers should act as the imparters of

knowledge and facilitate them by guiding on how to use the technology


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Integration of ICT in Education:

There is a concern on implementing ICT or social software into education. There

is not enough evidence on how this technology has been used by the staff and students.

Hence it make it necessary to review some areas like learning and teaching, scholarly

research, academic publishing, and libraries.

Teaching and Learning Nesta-funded Futurelab in the UK has been trying to understand

the potential impact of social software on education which views that the schools and

colleges have great emphasis lifelong learning and helping the students to develop their

skills in creativity and innovation. The teachers need to have comprehensive and

sustained professional development that will help in providing multiple skills of teaching.

Teacher quality is the factor that matters most for student learning (Darling-Hammond,

et al, 1997). Some of the examples of how social software tools are used and

implemented in the educational institutions is already been explained in the previous

section in the form of wikis, blogs, and social networking (The University of Brighton).

There is a threat that integration of new technologies in the education environment might

de-motivate certain students by this implementation of technologies. According to

Anderson P. the pedagogical issues need to be address as they are vital in integrating newtechnologies in education, he has pointed out the following issues:

there is a lack of understanding of students different learning modes as well asthesocial dimension of social software. In particular, more work is required in

order to understand the social dimension and this will require us to really get

inside the heads of people who are using these new environments for socialinteraction (Kukulska-Hulme, 2006).

Web 2.0 both provides tools to solve technical problems and presents issues thatraise questions. If students arrive at colleges and universities steeped in a more

socially networked Web, perhaps firmly entrenched in their own peer andmentoring communities through systems like MySpace, how will education handle

challenges to established ideas about hierarchy and the production and

authentication of knowledge?

How will this affect educations own efforts to work in a more collaborativefashion and provide institutional tools to do so? How will it handle issues such as

privacy and plagiarism when students are developing new social ways of

interacting and working? How will it deal with debates over shared authorship


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and assessment, the need to always forge some kind of online consensus, and

issues around students' skills in this kind of shared and often non-linear mannerof working, especially amongst science/engineering students (Fountain, 2005).

These issues also raise concerns whether the concept of Virtual Learning Environment

(VLE) does make any sense on Web 2.0.

Scholarly Research Because of the open nature of Web 2.0, easy-to-use, ability to

manage the metadata all attract the research environment and there are four technologies

that have seen development.

1. Folksonomies An example of this is the CombeChem work at the Southampton

University which was part of a laboratory work in the development of a formal

ontology based on established working lab practices.

To further understand the role of ICTs in development Silva L. and Westrup C. ,(2008)

did a research on a project called One-Laptop-Per-Child (OLPC) which discusses two

properties of ICT: fluidity and immutability. These two properties can help to better

understand the relationship between ICTs design and the adoption techniques used in

developing countries. It also illustrates the explanatory power of the properties on a

current phenomenon: the fats moving proliferation of low cost laptops targeted at aiding

poor children in developing countries (Silva L. and Westrup C. , 2008). The developing

countries stress more on the cultural, political, economical and institutional nature of

these technologies. The initiative of OLPC (non-profit organization in US) was

announced by Nicholas Negroponte (Head of the MIT media lab) in 2005 which had two

objectives 1. to build a laptop for less than $100, 2. that about every child should have a

laptop in the developing countries. It is a surprise that only two orders have been till 2007

from Uruguay and Peru and the advertised price for the laptop then was $188. What

Negroponte and his colleagues had done they had developed a business model for selling

the laptop where they will not take orders of less than one million dollars it was done to

create economies of scale to lower the production costs. The governments in developing

nations spend about $20 per child per year for their education hence the cost of the laptop

will represent the total cost of five years of education of a child. Although there was a


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hike in sales since but countries like India did not accept the idea stating reasons of

laptops not being their priority in education and also claiming the pedagogical reasons. It

was observed that OLPC found it very difficult to sell their laptops in the numbers they

expected. Negroponte has considered this project as an educational project with an aim to

contribute towards the education and economy of the developing countries. This initiative

was proposed in UN in 2005 and was praised by then UN Secretary Kofi Annan, the

initiative was regarded as a philanthropic act.

Although there have been efforts of implementing technologies in education sector but it

hasnt been completely successful, therefore to strengthen the pedagogy a new

technology called as mobile learning was implemented. This allows the students to have

an access to information wherever they go, thus overcoming the geographical limitations

of WWW to access the information over desktops. But there are also concerns on this

concept of e-learning as it threatens the quality of learning outcomes. In a study by

(Boulos M.N.K et al 2006) they have illustrated some disadvantages of implementing the

social software in education.

Social software are prone to be malicious which has serious impacts on the

quality issues because they are public domain hence no control over the content.

There can be issues of post copyright material and patent protection.

There is scarcity of meta-information on wiki articles which discourages the

authorship of the article.

Thus the wiki articles are also not considered to be accurate in the universities and

the students are not encouraged much to use them as their source of work because

of its open nature.

Conclusion:

By studying the implementation of Web 2.0 tools in education it is evident that

these tools would be beneficial on long run but there still should be a research done to

better ways of leveraging them to improve the teaching and learning productivity. This

research should include all the stakeholders or prospective users.


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References:

Anderson P., (2007), What is Web 2.0? Ideas, technologies and implications foreducation, JISC Technology and Standards Watch, online athttp://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/techwatch/tsw0701b.pdf

Boulos M.N.K., Maramba I., and Wheeler S., (2006), Wikis, blogs and podcasts: a newgeneration of Web-based tools for virtual collaborative clinical practice and education,BMC Medical Education, online at http://www.biomedcentral.com/1472-6920/6/41/

Darling-Hammond L., and Berry B., (1997), Investing in Teaching, Education Week onthe Web, online at http://www.edweek.org/ew/vol-17/37darlin.h17

Fountain R., (2005), Wiki Pedagogy, Dossiers Pratiques, Profetic, online athttp://www.profetic.org/dossiers/dossier_imprimer.php3?id_rubrique=110

Franklin T., and Harmelen M., (2007), Web 2.0 for Content Learning and Teaching inHigher Education, Franklin Consulting and Mark van Harmelen online athttp://staff.blog.ui.ac.id/harrybs/files/2008/10/web-2-for-content-for-learning-and-teaching-in-higher-education.pdf

Heeks R., (2010), Emerging Markets Development 2.0: The IT enabled Transformationof international Development, Communications of the ACM, Vol. 53, No.4, pp. 22-24

Joseph F., (4th December 2009), Role of Technology in the Education Sector,BizTech2.com, online at http://biztech2.in.com/india/opinions/education/role-of-technology-in-the-education-sector/71492/0

Kukulska-Hulme A., (2006), Learning activities on the move, Podcast, HandheldLearning conference (12th Oct 2006), London, online athttp://www.handheldlearning.co.uk/.

Silva L. and Westrup C. ,(2008) (Un) objectionable Development? The One Laptop PerChild Project

Westrup, C., (2010). Governing the Web: Dependency, Development 2.0 and the Websquared. [Presentation Slides] March 2010, The University of Manchester.

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Development 2.0 - Education 2.0