Karen Archer Perry Ensuring Socio-Economic Inclusion

Education 2.0

Last week Michael Searson of Kean University invited me to attend Education 2.0, a two-day workshop sponsored by the Center for Innovation in Education at Kean and I finally got Web 2.0 and what it means to education and community. What Web 2.0 brings to the process is the ability to more easily create new content and collaborate, turning students from consumers to producers and changing the whole environment and structure for learning – a point brought home beautifully by Marco Torres from San Fernando High School in California.

Blogger and educator Will Richardson pointed out in his keynote talk “A Web of Connections: Why the Read/Write Web Changes Everything” that students can easily “search” to gather facts. With Web 2.0 tools, they can also comment on each others work and collaborate on projects through wikis. They can produce and publish reports, research and stories through videos, podcasts, blogs and web sites, making their voices and their work available to other for their use and collaboration. This ability for students to produce content and collaborate creates the opportunity to extend the classroom “learning community” beyond the school walls and into the community as a whole. We are seeing a number of successful examples of this happening.

• Students in Maine Learns are conducting scientific research on environment in Maine’s Lakes and publishing their findings online as part of a larger project of the Maine Lakes Conservatory Institute.
• Canadian student, Hillary blogged her thoughts on Nata, a village in Botswana devastated by poverty and AIDS and got feedback from both her classmates and from Nata residents in Africa!
• Even first graders, like those at Willow Elementary published their research on ants in an audio cast and they track hits to their web site to see how others are learning from their work.

Perhaps these concepts are best brought home by Larry Lessig in his March 2007 presentation to TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) – a forum that brings together thought leaders from around the world to share ideas and provoke conversation. In his presentation on user generated content, Larry makes a compelling argument that we are at the dawn of a new period as digital media empowers all of us to create new content and contribute to the human dialogue. I encourage you to sit through the ad and watch the video; the message is compelling and very well delivered with some good clips of John Philip Sousa, Jesus and President Bush too.

People say that Web 2.0 democratizes the web and democratizes content creation. It does. But while Web 2.0 and other digital media tools provide the hardware and software platforms for collaboration, it is digital inclusion and ubiquitous broadband access that truly democratize the web. Without access, these new tools of empowerment will remain the purview of the few, when our society really needs engagement from many.

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