Web 2.0 and E-learning 2.0

“Web 2.0 applications are those that make the most of the intrinsic

advantages of that platform: delivering software as a continually- updated service that gets better the more people use it, consuming and remixing data from multiple sources, including individual users, while providing their own data and services in a form that allows remixing by others, creating network effects through an ‘architecture of participation’ and going beyond the page metaphor of Web 1.0 to deliver rich user experiences”.

A blog is a well-known Web 2.0 application which is an interactive journal-like application that has been replacing former personal Websites. Some of the other Web 2.0 services are sharing photos and videos using applications such as flickr24 _{(photos) and}

YouTube25(videos), building social networks of friends using applications such as facebook26 and collaborative building of knowledge databases or encyclopaedias such as wikipedia27.. In addition, there is the collaborative evaluation through tagging and

commenting of products, information or Websites, such as Amazon.com book reviews,

del.icio.us28 portable bookmark lists, or question services through Yahoo Answers29, as

well as labelling and classification of Web content in general such as in (Truran et al. 2005). Moreover, with Web 2.0, the importance of personalisation is evident; users now 24 _{http://www.flickr.com/} 25 _{http://www.youtube.com/} 26 _{http://www.facebook.com/} 27 _{http://wikipedia.org/} 28 _{http://del.icio.us/} 29_{http://answers.yahoo.com/}

expect to be automatically notified about new products and services that meet their interest from their favourite websites. In addition, they can expect their behaviour to be monitored in order to adapt to the new change of interest or behaviour, hence the growing importance of user modelling and adaptation.

Web 2.0 is changing how the world interacts, socialises and learns. Therefore, the same trends and advances that have started to dominate the Web have also affected the e- learning systems, which are becoming “learner-centred” (Downes 2005). It is moving from the know-what and know-how to know-where (Corcoles et al. 2007), away from the traditional learning experience towards training the users to gain the ability to locate information and knowledge and be able to make use of this knowledge. This type of learning aims towards a new generation of online learners, who are described as digital-

natives (Corcoles et al. 2007), since they have been introduced to the Web and its

technologies earlier in their education than the previous generations.

When the Web 2.0 concepts were applied to the e-learning systems, it resulted in the term e-learning 2.0 being coined by Downes, who explains it thus:

“ Learning is characterized not only by greater autonomy for the

learner, but also a greater emphasis on active learning, with creation, communication and participation playing key roles” (Downes 2005).

Around 95% of UK Higher Education institutes reported using at least one Virtual

Learning Environment (VLE) (Walczowski and Ellis. 2007), which is another name for

the LMS. The modern VLE or LMS provides the tools and environment where this social collaboration can take place within a learning context and therefore is essential to today’s online learning. Moodle, which is chosen in this research as the LMS and login point to

the new adaptive integrated learning environment, has a number of e-learning 2.0 features (Millard and Essex 2007). It provides a collection of collaborative and social tools that Moodle calls activities, such as Wikis, Chat, Blogs, Forums, Workshops, Glossaries and other tools. According to Alexander (Alexander 2006), education is like a conversation and learning content is something with which one performs some type of operation, rather than the learner just reading the content passively .

The distinct characteristics of e-learning 2.0 could be summarised as follows: one which is learner-centred, aimed towards digitally-literate learners, where all users communicate as peers in this social environment, and in which social software is built upon a Web platform using new Web technologies, such as Web Services and AJAX. In addition, it moves from the traditional monolithic standalone architectural learning applications with static, predefined learning content into an open learning environment of interoperable open source platforms and tools that support online social networks and communities (Fumero 2006).

Application of usage of Web 2.0 tools in different universities and learning institutes is presented in (Adisen and Barker 2007) and a usage survey to measure the impact of Web 2.0 is reported in (Safran et al. 2007). This survey has shown that blogs and wikis are widely adopted compared to other Web 2.0 applications for educational purposes. Moreover, the use of wikis and blogs in education has been investigated in (Duffy and Bruns 2006). The Web 2.0 trends are applied to e-learning through courses that are application services, where an effective course should follow the principles of good Web publishing, the pages should be displayed easily without the need of special plug-ins and

with appropriate navigation, and any integration to other services should be transparent (Rosen 2006).

Weller in (Weller 2006) predicts the future directions of learning environments and suggests that they will be based on Downes’ Web 2.0 which has been described earlier (Downes 2005). The portal concept, which allows the user to tailor the content to their needs or preferences, is taken to the extreme in the e-learning 2.0 environment, where users can easily aggregate learning objects and all kinds of learning content from various sources. This leads to the environment presented as an e-portfolio tool (Walczowski and Ellis. 2007). One example of those new emerging e-learning Web-based applications can be seen in an application known as is My Happy Planet30, which teaches languages through a partner who speaks the desired language to be learned. This partner is also interested in one of the languages the first learner speaks. Therefore, students learn languages by sharing their own knowledge of another language in return.

However, despite all the benefits of the new user-centric nature of Web 2.0 and e- learning 2.0, educators, teachers and learning institutes which choose to apply those technologies are faced with some new challenges (Millard and Essex 2007). For example, in a wiki, there is room for vandalism or false entries that could be presented without notice, especially as the idea behind the wiki is that what the majority thinks is right is so, which is not necessarily approved by all specialists or educators. One way to tackle this problem is by teaching the students themselves to use critical thinking and to question whatever they read or see, a skill that is much needed in life outside the classroom. Another issue is that as users are becoming increasingly diverse, especially in an online distance learning course or environment, they might have very different views that they

want to express; some would contradict others, and therefore learning how to deal with those situations is also important. An additional challenge is to know how to balance innovation and consistency when it comes to students’ expectations and assessment. New methods and ideas could indeed enhance the learning experiences provided that they neither confuse the learner, who is overwhelmed by information. nor overshadow the original learning objectives (Millard and Essex 2007).

Finally, Web 2.0 tools should be used when they are needed and when there is an educational purpose behind that and not simply because they exist. People’s needs should guide the technology and not vice versa as often happens in the case of e-learning.