Prof of Open University says that academia out of date in Web 2.0 world
Martin Weller is Professor of Educational Technology at the Open University in the UK (OUUK) and is the academic lead on the OUUK’s SocialLearn project which is developing a social network for learners. He blogs at The Ed Techie
He has written an essay as part of a special edition of the education journal On the Horizon. Authors contributing to the special edition of the journal were asked to contribute a blog post describing their articles in a condensed form; Weller's post appeared here.
The basic premise is:
Higher education faces a challenge. It may not now it yet, but it does. And the challenge is this – when learners have been accustomed to very facilitative, usable, personalisable and adaptive tools both for learning and socialising, why will they accept standardised, unintuitive, clumsy and out of date tools in formal education they are paying for?
He argues that the experience provided by universities goes beyond simple classroom-based student-teacher learning. The main reason schools attempt to attract a diverse motivated student body is due to the fact that they play an important role in influencing the course of learning by directing discussions inside the classroom and continuing the interactions outside. From this view, universities act as learning aggregators: they form groups of students with similar interests and connect them with experts in the field and relevant resources.
Weller points out that Web 2.0 communities perform a largely parallel function, in that they foster groups with common interest and link them to relevant resources. However, these communities don’t fully replace the university experience as these communities tend to have self-appointed experts. Weller argues that comparisons between the two systems can’t be helped and being raised in a Web 2.0 world shapes the students’ expectations.
To this point, Weller is working on the Social Learn project, which is intended to be a replacement for the systems currently in use by univerisities. It is intented to be an extensible platform with well documented APIs for doing so. The group hopes to make the whole package open source in the future.
April 25th, 2009 at 20:56
Have a look at http://www.ChineseTeachers.com for an interesting web 2.0 learning experience (only for Chinese language) – you can learn from your browser on any computer, anywhere in the world. Your bookmarked teachers, your lessons notes, and your profile stays ‘in the cloud’.
More details at http://www.crunchbase.com/company/chineseteachers-com below
ChineseTeachers.com provides a flexible no-booking-needed & pay-per-second Chinese lessons with strictly assessed native Chinese teachers.
The site removed unnecessary barriers that make learning Chinese a hassle: travel to go to a language class, rigid booking and cancellation rules, significant upfront fees, boring learning topics, software to download, dependency over a public & shared VoIP like Skype, etc. and we developed, over two years, a robust, dedicated proprietary VoIP & billing platform that enables our members to login from any computer, directly from their browsers to access 200+ (and growing) strictly-assessed native Chinese teachers; as well as professionals covering a wide range of disciplines and industries.
ChineseTeachers.com offers its members the choice to have imaginative lessons relevant to them and their jobs, with teachers who can also speak our student’s native language, English, Japanese, Korean, French, German, Estonian and many others.
August 17th, 2009 at 1:05
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