Education Changing in Web 2.0
February 29, 2008
Web 2.0 is changing the way colleges and universities interact with their students. As a university student, I am using Web 2.0 tools in my everyday life: Blogs, MySpace, Facebook, Flicker, Del.icio.us, Wikis, and so on. These tools have huge potential to enrich classrooms and boost the pace and quality of education.
Take course CS292 “Beyond the One Way Web” at Vanderbilt for example, students are asked to create their own blog entries for this course, describing what they learn and feel. Our teacher monitors the site, but does not edit or interfere. In the process, I learnt writing skills (especially in the context of Web 2.0 applications), collecting and sharing information. Apart from regular curriculum, I learnt a lot when I “practice by doing” and communicate with other students. Besides, multimedia learning is largely introduced in this course, which is always impressive and hard to forget.
“The old concept of curriculum is dead”. The old paradigm is very easy to master: sit students down, keep them quiet and feed them information. On the other hand, Web 2.0 encourages creativity, exploration and interactions. The disruptive technologies of Web 2.0 offer a good opportunity for innovation.
Reference:
Teachers told to leap out of textbook time warp with IT
The Age (Melbourne, Australia), August 1, 2006 Tuesday, COMPUTERS; Next; Pg. 1, 638 words, NICK MILLER
by Chen Chen
Very concise, but the Lex / Nex article requires an ID to read it.