Collective Intelligence

Participating and mediating in social software learning environment is closely related to the social construction of knowledge that Levy (2000) calls “collective intelligence”. Levy argues that in such an environment, the group as a whole can tap what any one person knows. Writing is as Bakhtin claims, “the product of the whole complex social situation in which it has occurred” (quotd in Todorov, 1984). The dialogical design of writing tasks in blogs and wiki or podcast production in the networked community allows conversations to fuel these writing and vice versa. Concepts and ideas can be amplified in such collective participation. This form of learning design hence requires a shift from the personalized media that was central to the idea of the digital revolution toward socialized media that is central to the culture of media convergence (H.Jenkins,2006a).

References:

Jenkins, H. (2006a). Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press.

Todorov, T., (1984). Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Bridging the Participation Gap

My first encounter with a PC was during my undergraduate days in the computer lab, and that was just trying to finish up assignments using wordpad. I still remember the experience of feeling so inadequate at it in comparison with some of my classmates (from more well off background) who's got previous exposure to the technology.

In retrospect, my teaching experiences (5 years ago) involving multiliteracies mirrors to some extent the kind of participation gap we had 10 years ago. I had been to two schools with very different student demorgraphics. One school had students from very good family background and students seem to take to multiliteracies well and participate meaningfully and engagingly in social software learning environment. On the other hand, students from the other school had to struggle with after school part-time jobs just to have their daily allowances. For these students, social software learning tasks remain narrow and unengaging. In addition, these students' informal learning experiences with social software pales in comparison with that of the former school students.

In bridging this participation gap, our ministry of education in Singapore has done well in implementing master plans for IT in education. For the initial master plan, the focus was in equipping schools with ICT infrastructure. Having recognized that it is insufficient to just provide access to ICT infrastructure in bridging the participation gap, the master plan was refined in 1997 to focus "...less on technology and more on providing the skills and content that is most beneficial...(pg 8)" (Wartella, O'Keefe and Scantlin 2000). One of the key strategies for the plan is then to equip our students with thinking, learning and communication skills through IT based teaching and learning. The master plan gained impetus later on as the education system move towards integrating IT for engaged learning with the "Teach Less Learn More" (Engaged Learning) movement. This speaks importantly on the interdependence of IT use and strong pedagogies, for the full potential of IT for teaching and learning can't be tapped if it is used based on didactic teaching.

With the emergence of web 2.0 tools and increased access to higher bandwidth, more innovations in such tools integration for engaged learning are taking place in some of our schools. In these schools, students are not just consumers of technology but creators and participants of it. They may be producing and hosting podcasts on some social issues or engaging in process writing for some themes using wiki engines. Such participatory learning is characterized by students' artistic expression and engagement in communities of learning, where creations are shared, peer critiqued and peer learnt. It is of interest to note that these schools also have strong programs for their teaching and learning, adopting new teaching approaches such as inquiry based learning, problem based learning or alternative assessment. Such programs have successfully leverage on the web 2.0 tools to situate students' learning to real world contexts as well as real world processes in the creation of solution or ideas.

The goal here is to extend such participatory learning opportunties to all students in all schools. One may argue that students are already informally engaged in such participatory culture through their own peers outside school hours. This assumption holds true only to students where lots of such informal learning opportunities avail to them; it does not stand when considered against students from lower socio-economic background.

I believe that this can be achieved to a great part by coupling effective pedagogically sound learning programs with web 2.0 technologies. Having said that, we note that students can only engage in the new participatory learning activites only if they can read and write. Students must expand their basic literacy competencies in order to develop the new social and cultural skills in web 2.0 participatory literacies. We may build these skills into their daily activities in ways appropriate to the curriculum to be learnt. Whilst implementing new approaches to learning through problem based learning or alternative assessment, teachers can leverage on emerging web 2.0 media tools to design social and cultural learning activities for students.

Through such particpatory activities, school can start to equip students with just not essential learning, thinking and communication skills, but much more with the social and cultural skills necessary to participate fully in 21st century learning and working. This can and will be done in the hope that all our students can be equal participants in the dynamic and changing world of tomorrow. Notwithstanding this optimism, more developmental and empirical evidence is needed to affirm this belief.


Reference:
Wartella, E., O'Keffe, B., & Scantlin R. (2000). "Children and Interactive Media: A Compendium of Current Research and Directions for the future," New York: Markle Foundation. Available online at http://www.markle.org/downloadable_assets/cimcompendium.pdf

A Day in the Life of Web 2.0

Found this very interesting article by David Warlick in techLEARNING. David has described the possible integration of web 2.0 tools into the teaching, learning and administration of a school 2.0. What is also useful is he's aggregated a list of web 2.0 tools usage explanations and its corresponding url sources. The best way to learn about web 2.0 tools will be to play and experiment with some of the suggested tools.

Notwithstanding the pedagogically sound and innovative design of the learning approaches suggested in this article, we need to be in cognizant of two implementation factors.

1. Be sure to bridge the participation gap of some students in terms of technological access and more importantly, the necessary learning, social and cultural skills required to be engaged meaningfully and appropriately in these web 2.0 environments. Some students who are more well exposed and educated due to social class factors may be at the forefront whilst the rest may be well left behind on the other side of the particpation gap.
   
2. Be sensitive to the adoption readiness of teachers as not all teachers are vanguards of technology in schools, what's more web 2.0 (you may like to view the video below). Many teachers will feel as helpless as the medieval man in the video below when they feel new experiences. We need to provide the necessary professional development support that is contextualized to their own familiar teaching practices and make it the tone as safe as possible.

I'll like to suggest an ecological approach to web 2.0 integration in schools. Let it be a bottom up implementation from a subject department, integrating the used case success stories into the professional development of teachers from the other departments in parallel. Evolve the system to an ecological stage by having inter-department collaboration in projects such as performance assessment tasks across various subjects areas which leverage on web 2.0 tools to develop 21st century literacies. This approach can be applied similarly to collaborations in teaching and administration resources. The school model can then be cascaded up to inter-school/district level.

This is my 2 cents worth of the matter and all comments are most welcomed.

Web 2.0 and the implications of social software to education

After reading the discussion of Web
2.0 on Wikipedia, and following many of the links, this is what I gathered.

Web 2.0 is sometimes called the "Participatory Web" based on an architecture for interaction. Where Web 1.0 is represented by traditional static pages; Web 2.0 is represented by server-side software that is more interactive and made for content sharing which is free from the hassle of formating issues. This is made possible by XML as compared to HTML technology. It encompasses a social phenomenon of creating and distributing Web content itself, characterized by open communication, decentralization of authority and freedom to share and re-use.

I especially like the description based on the article by Tim O'Reilly where he described

"Like many important concepts, Web 2.0 doesn't have a hard boundary, but rather, a gravitational core. You can visualize Web 2.0 as a set of principles and practices that tie together a veritable solar system of sites that demonstrate some or all of those principles, at a varying distance from that core."

Figure 1 shows a "meme map" of Web 2.0 that was developed at a brainstorming session during FOO Camp, a conference at O'Reilly Media.

As for the article on social software (Dalsgaard C. 2006 Social software: E-learning beyond learning management systems European Journal of Open, Distance and E-Learning - EURODL), this is my reflection for it.

As schools implement e-learning, it will be important to do more than replicate their paper-based predecessors on a data-base-type Learning Management System. We need to consider the individuality, creativity, and ownership of students in these e-learning tasks. We may want to consider incoporating emerging Web 2.0-type technologies to motivate and engage students.

Having said this, we as educators need to be aware of the issues related to the use of Web 2.0 technologies in our teaching. Below are some comments to the use of a common Web 2.0 application in wiki.

The last 20 lines of the transcript from the video Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us
is as follows:

"...

The Web is no longer just linking information…

The Web is linking people…

Web 2.0 is linking people…

…people sharing, tracing, and collaborating…

Wikipedia

Web 2.0

edit this page

We’ll need to rethink a few things…

We’ll need to rethink copyright

We’ll need to rethink authorship

We’ll need to rethink identity

We’ll need to rethink ethics

We’ll need to rethink aesthetics

We’ll need to rethink rhetorics

We’ll need to rethink governance

We’ll need to rethink privacy

We’ll need to rethink commerce

We’ll need to rethink love

We’ll need to rethink family

We’ll need to rethink ourselves"

One common application of Web 2.0 is Wikipedia, or online encyclopedia. Based on the design architecture principles of Web 2.0, any user, be it identified or anonymous, can edit the resource. The key issue then lies in the anonymity and frequency of these edits. The reliability and reality of these resources are determined not by factual truths of its sources but by the online collective concurrence of a group of users. We may be reminded that certian realities are socially and culturally constructed, but that does not necessary mean that they are true.

With the reliability issue of Wiki at the foreground, some schools are prohibiting or banning the use of Wiki as a citation source. The eSchool news article quotes Neil Waters as saying that Wikipedia is a great place to start your research, but a terrible place to end it. Hence, until Citizendium is ready to replace Wiki, we need to prepare our students to possess the necessary information literacy skills to evaluate the different truths in any resource they encounter, even Wikipedia, lest they be blinded to the social and cultural biases that shape those resources they find.