Education for a Digital World Advice, Guidelines and Effective Practice from Around Globe, 2008a

1 – Emerging Technologies in E-learning
large corporations who expect to profit from sales
(particularly in the entertainment sector) will fight
widespread distribution of their product. Solutions like
Creative Commons licensing will become the new way
of doing business. See Chapter 15, Understanding
Copyright.
WEBSITES MENTIONED IN THIS SECTION
• Creative Commons: http://creativecommons.org
• Creative Commons Worldwide:
http://creativecommons.org/worldwide
Summary
“Web 2.5, Web 3.0, Web 4.5, Web n: whatever it is,
I’m enjoying the ride. The pieces are coming together.
Glue, indeed.” (Cross, 2006).
Traditional teaching and learning methods and institutions
will not go away. They will still be necessary to
provide research-based knowledge, structure, and social
context for learning. The new technologies will not replace
traditional learning but complement it. The history
of technology shows us that few technologies
replace previous technologies; instead they emerge to
coexist and complement them. Television did not kill
radio or movies. The Internet has not replaced books.
The new technologies discussed in this chapter will be
used primarily for extending the ability to create, communicate,
and collaborate.
CREATE
With Web 1.0, almost everyone was a consumer. Only
technology wizards had the power to create. Now that
online technologies have advanced, Web 2.0 enables
almost anyone to be a producer as well as a consumer.
Pushing this to education, Web 2.0 tools such as blogs
and wikis create a level playing field, where faculty, parents,
and even students compete with vendors to produce
educational content. Going beyond Web 2.0,
technology will raise the bar yet again so that everyone
can produce educational activities and assessment
strategies that incorporate or go beyond the static content.
With this new equality, we face some familiar challenges.
Web 1.0 brought us information overload. It still
is not easy for everyone to consistently and quickly find
the information they seek online. The same holds true
for Web 2.0 information, if not more so, since there are
so many more information providers. As the quantities
of both producers and products grow, quality becomes
more difficult to distinguish as well. Instructors today
do their students a great service by asking them to consider
validity, reliability, and bias of online information.
Looking forward to Web 2.5, Web 3.0, and beyond, we
will rely on context-sensitive searching, intelligent
searching, peer review ratings, and content expert review
ratings to separate the digital chaff from the digital
wheat. Finding instructional content and activities to
meet almost any learning objectives will continue to
become easier, but finding quality instruction will take
more effort.
COMMUNICATE
In many countries around the world today, communication
by cell phones is ubiquitous. Trends in mobile
and social computing will make it possible for learners
to create and interact with learning communities. For
example, using course rosters as “buddy lists” in connection
with wireless, mobile devices such as personal
digital assistants (PDAs), students will be able to identify
if their peers are nearby on campus. Someone in a large
section class with more than 100 students will be able to
use technology to create a sense of community. The
social computing phenomenon will move beyond using
static Web pages to share party pictures with peers to
using digital storytelling to share competencies with
future employers. Instead of smart mobs protesting a
political decision, “smart study groups” will form to
prepare for quizzes or to provide feedback about written
assignments before submitting them for a grade.
Communication challenges in education will include
infrastructure, resources, and freedom of speech. Maintaining
an adequate communication infrastructure for
learning means setting up wireless networks throughout
a campus or even throughout a metropolitan area. This
work is expensive, labour intensive, and requires a great
deal of planning. Educational organizations do not always
have the right amount of resources to keep communications
running smoothly. Chapter 26, Techno
Expression, covers bridging the gap between allowing
freedom of expression and setting boundaries to restrict
inappropriate behaviour. Despite the power of emerging
technologies in education, this balance is difficult to
achieve.
COLLABORATE
With both current and emerging technologies, people
sometimes collaborate without the intention or knowledge
of doing so. Mashups, for instance, require multiple
parties to play a role, but only the person who creates
Education for a Digital World 17