Collaboration & Community

I'm one of many educators who thinks that we, as teachers, need to learn more about Web 2.0 so that we can teach Web 2.0, but let's be clear on why. While I'm a self-confessed geek who digs technology, I would not propose systemic change just because Web 2.0 stuff is cool: teaching technology for technology's own sake is not cool.

Web 2.0 is about collaboration & community; it is about life-long learning and the culture and environment in which our students will grow up. Our good ol' education system has a well-established (and well-ingrained) "collaborative" structure, and promotes a certain sense of community, but the cultural shift of our learners requires changes to our outdated notions that make up the context of educational collaboration & community -- for the sake of our learners. This change has to come from the system, and teachers are the tools of the system that can make the change happen.

As Will Richardson puts it, teachers need to understand the (Web 2.0) tools "to make the connections, the personal shift around those tools drives the pedagogical shift." What teachers need is learning, not training.

Richardson intimates, with a nod to John Pederson for the concept, that valuable teacher PD should be about this kind of learning: community building. Sounds good to me: learning happens best in a collaborative community, right? Classrooms are collaborative communities, but so are blogs, wikis, and a lot of other Web 2.0 "tools." Sitting in rows listening to a teacher or being guided in the world of Web 2.0 -- which do you think best prepares our students for their futures these days?