Teaching Web 2.0

At staff meeting last week, my colleague presented on his trip to the Life Long Learning conference. One of the things he mentioned was teaching students in their own Personal Learning Environments - which, these days, are more likely to be web 2.0 based. Instead of bringing the students round to the University's way of thinking - and using their education platforms - we should be bringing our way of thinking around to the students. This, of course, does not mean that we should be pandering to students and forgetting the traditional educational processes but aim for a syncretic pedagogy.

After the session, I had coffee with a number of my colleagues where we discussed learning web 2.0 applications. From this - and my experience in the Otago Uni DIL project - we need to consider how we approach these applications/strategies. For example, often the thing which stops people from experimenting on-line is that they are afraid they will cause some damage. However, the good thing about using a University system is that there is really very little danger of doing something which will damage the system since it is so protected. Even if you are using your home system the worst you will need to do is format your hard-drive and this shouldn't be a problem since you should back up your data periodically anyway. However, is it enough to just tell those who lack confidence - particularly if they worry they will break the system - that there is very little chance of doing something wrong.

I think we should be teaching the skills that are useful for web 2.0 in general - rather than actual applications. There are some things - such as creating a profile, how to use the help function - that are almost universal across applications. Of course, you need to teach these skills within the context of an application or they will not make any sense...