Forget the manual!

My partner Jenn got a new laptop recently, and, in the course of quickly typing a newsletter article, she accidentally hit a combination of keys that rendered the keyboard incapable of producing the symbols above the number keys. She called me in for tech support.

Not having encountered this before, I went to the Windows Help manual, and searched the index with logical terms that seemed appropriate to the situation. After much reading, use of new keywords, skimming and scanning, I was no closer to a solution. I went to the HP Laptop Help manual, and searched the index with logical terms that seemed appropriate to the situation. After much reading, use of new keywords, skimming and scanning, I was no closer to a solution.

I went online, entered the same keywords, and immediately found a user-based help forum in which others had encountered the same problem, and offered the solution: I used a learning network to quickly and efficiently get the knowledge that I needed.

Time wasted searching corporate manuals: 20 minutes. Time well spent in seeking a Web 2.0 solution: 20 seconds. Now that's the power of the two-way, read-write web!

Push vs. Pull

Thanks to Will Richardson for sharing these Dion Hinchcliffe Web 2.0 diagrams. Many are tech-heavy, but some are accessible to those of us who don't know our RSS from our Atom (whatever that means).

In browsing these images, I found one that, for me, clicked in terms of why I think that Web 2.0 is so important to learning. It was not the diagram per se, but the two simple words it used: push and pull.

Until now, most systems of education have been "push-o-centric." Schools directly push specific information out to students; teachers are the pushers. Even the students who show up in the library to "pull" information out of books have been pushed to do so. It makes sense that this is the way it has been till now: if the indication of how educated one is rests with one's achievement in a top-down system, then people will willingly (though also, perhaps, grudgingly) get pushed. The very fact that we call it "educating" (what gets done to students) more often than "learning" (what students do) is telling.

This model of one-way pushing is being directly challenged by the culture of Web 2.0. Web 2.0 is largely a "share/pull" model: if I have something to share, I send it out into the Web, with all the tags and metadata required to make it discoverable to those who may want it. Likewise, if I want to learn something, I pull that information to myself via my learning network.

I'm not sure if anyone ever liked sitting through live lectures to receive what was pushed, but if, as is the case in our current Web 2.0 world, you can pretty much pull what you need to yourself whenever you want, then we need to re-think what we call education (or more significantly, what we call learning) in a structured "education system."

A Self-Directed Future

I think that the future of learning is self-directed, as enabled by web 2.0 (and beyond) technology. This may seem like a threat to contemporary (outdated?) educational systems, but it doesn't have to be. If our job as teachers is (and has always been) to best prepare our students for their probable futures, then there's no reason why we shouldn't be doing that job to the best of our abilities at all times, regardless of technology-based cultural shifts.

Indeed, some of the things that we say we like to foster in students today include creativity, critical thinking, independent thought, collaboration, etc. These are lifelong learning skills: skills that are, perhaps, best and most relevantly taught through the use of Web 2.0 technology. They are skills that are not necessarily well taught in the environment of an outcomes-based, standardized testing education system.

To serve our students best, we need to adapt our pedagogy, and learn and teach Web 2.0 tools. This statement, I'm sure, will prompt a lot of "yeah, buts" from a lot of teachers: "yeah, but I don't have time to learn it," "yeah, but there's a curriculum to follow," "yeah, but there's no money for technology," etc., etc. Of course we have to make due with what we have, but the even bigger "of course," as far as I'm concerned, is the "of course we have to advocate for meaningful staff learning time, of course we have to integrate use of these technologies into the curriculum, and of course we need to pressure Boards for the tools that will shape our students' futures." If we don't do these things, I'm not sure we're doing our jobs well...

Web 2.0 Assessment: Outside the "Comfort Zone?"

The assertion that Web 2.0 skills should be taught to students will (likely, inevitably, unfortunately) lead to the question of how we assess student learning of those skills. No wonder, then, that many teachers -- even those who use Web 2.0 tools themselves -- are hesitant to implement such instruction in the classroom: assessing Web 2.0 performance is outside of their comfort zone, and likely outside of the "outdated" system curriculum itself. With standardized test results being politically weighty, and high grades valued over learning itself, we're not exactly in a climate conducive to new, school-based Web 2.0 culture and learning.

There are lots of problems with standardized testing and the "importance" of grades in our education system as it stands, but avoiding teaching something that our students will need for future success just because we've never taught and assessed it before seems wrong to me.

Let's teach Web 2.0, and maybe even make some mistakes as we go: at worst, our students will see us as human, but they'll see us as lifelong learners, too. Let's figure out assessment as we go, maybe even with input from students. It's their futures that are at stake, after all...