School 2.0



I don’t know where I’ve been, but reading this article was the first time I had ever heard the term “Web 2.0”, and honestly, the Web 2.0 video overwhelmed me a little at first.  The video’s focus on “the machine is learning” and “we are the machine” gave me flashbacks of The Matrix.  I felt a small panic attack coming on.  However, the more I read and the more I watched, the more comfortable I became with the idea of wikis and the concept of Web 2.0.

The idea of the internet becoming a living and breathing thing that grows with each interaction with the user is fascinating and exciting.  To think that every time it’s used, it becomes more effective in giving us what we want/need.  I immediately started thinking of ways that I could use this concept in my classroom.  Not only do I want to use wikis as a part of a lesson, but I plan on incorporating the philosophy of “’we, the media’ decide what is important” into my approach. I've been describing it to myself as "School 2.0". The idea of the users deciding what works and what doesn't to decide what processes become standard sounds to me like the best way to build a classroom. Listen to the students to see what ideas work and what ones don't. What strategies are working? What ones aren't? Use their input to adjust lessons to create something that will be truly effective in reaching your audience.  The key points listed in the article sound exactly like something that could create a very effective learning environment;

• Control over unique, hard-to-recreate data sources that get richer as more people use them
• Trusting users as co-developers
• Harnessing collective intelligence
• Leveraging the long tail through customer self-service

Also, he made a statement in the article that could be applied directly to education;

“Companies that succeed will create applications that learn from their users, using an architecture of participation to build a commanding advantage not just in the software interface, but in the richness of the shared data.”

As for wikis being incorporated into an assignment, I would love to set up something that allows students to create a classroom wiki; something where each student can contribute to a product, adding their input and opinions.  One idea that came to mind was creating a character profile wiki that relates to a book or story that the class would be reading.  I would set up a page for each character, and the students would be responsible for defining them as a character.  I think that one of the coolest parts would be that there would be some differing opinions about each character as not everyone gets the same message from every story.  This would lead to classroom discussions that would allow us to dive deeper into each individual character.  We could discuss why certain students feel the way they do and see how those interpretations could be incorporated into the definition.  I can see already that I’m going to have fun finding ways to incorporate this new technology.