Learning the Web 2.0 way (2/2)

Technology is not always a student’s best friend. It’s more like a moody, unreliable and can’t-be-trusted ex with whom you have a love/hate relationship. Everyone’s got a few tragic tales about lost essays, blue screens of death, and MS Word suddenly shutting down on them before they could save their work.

But thanks to Ward Cunningham‘s invention of the wonder that is Wiki, there is one less problem we have stress about. Gone are the days of e-mailing a document/project/essay back and forth between group members, bickering over who has edited or deleted crucial information, and freaking out when the most updated version can’t be found in anyone’s e-mail account.

A wiki is a combination of a website and a Word document that allows multiple users to access and edit the document collaboratively from a single location. (Hence, no need for feverish e-mailing). More importantly, it keeps track of all the changes made to the document, stores older versions of the document and allows users to compare the older and new version.

Wikis in education

Wikis have great educational value and are being used widely by universities and some schools. Students can use it to work on a group report, compile results or analyse data (Google Spreadsheets), and teachers can use it to collaboratively structure their courses and interact with their students. Because a wiki is a “wide open space” in which everyone has equal power and access, it allows students to “own [their] education experience”. See Wiki evangelist, Stuart Mader’s post on ways to use wikis in education.

Mader has argued in his book that “today’s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach”. Students have grown up surrounded by technology and are comfortable with it; and it’s up to teachers to revise their teaching methods to incorporate tools and resources that could help them build a better, more engaging rapport with their learners.

Teachers at a middle school in the States are doing just that: they are using this wiki to teach their French classes, and provide notes, videos and assignments to their students. Brown University has also set up a course advisor wiki that allows students to edit and review the courses that their professors teach. A lecturer at Bowdoin College has been quite successful in using a more scholarly wiki to engage with students in his Romantic Literature Course. There are also countless number of wikis set up by students to facilitate their own learning, like this one.

Wikis seem to be most commonly used to teach students writing skills. Not only do they encourage engaging writing, close reading and careful editing, they also teach students “network literacy”. According to Jill Walker, a prominent blogger and web 2.0 theorist, this involves preparing students to write collaboratively and for public consumption. It means, “jolting students out of the conventional individualistic, closed writing of essays only ever seen by [their] professor”.

Challenges

When used in the context of educational instruction, wikis have encountered various criticisms. Because it allows anyone to chop and change content, it’s difficult to keep track of who has edited what. Linked to this is the issue of security and how much of “control” should be given to students to edit course content or review papers, etc.

Brian Lamb importantly notes that control is only an issue if teachers/lecturers try to impose it on the medium. The aim of a wiki is ultimately to facilitate learning among students, and with their teachers, in a setting that doesn’t mimic that of a classroom. A teacher’s role on a wiki should be to engage students, not pull rank on them. Lamb argues that teachers must relinquish some of their authority in order for students to engage meaningfully on a wiki. Otherwise, wikis will have no real use or effectiveness for students, and we may as well just be content with PowerPoint.

Wikis present a huge departure from the conventional teacher-student relationship, so it’s understandable why those who are still devoted to the chalk-on-blackboard method of teaching frown upon it. The value that students and teachers accrue from wikis will depend on the extent to which both parties are able to handle the power issue – teachers have to give up some of theirs, and students need to use theirs responsibly.

Sources:

Brian Lamb. “Wide Open Spaces: Wikis, Ready or Not“.

Stuart Mader. “Using Wiki in Education“.

The underdogs of social networking

Despite bandwidth issues and warnings from their bosses (in my case, the Rhodes IT department), South Africans have gone gaga over social networking. Justin Hartman’s nifty stats show that there are over 730 000 of us on Facebook, making SA the country with the 10^th highest number of Facebook users in the world.

What’s equally interesting is that many local social networks have emerged in the past year or two, some aimed at connecting the general SA online population, and others at forming interest-based communities.

Home grown

There’s Blueworld, where users can network, share pics and videos, and set up a blog. It also has a free SMS service, and a feature that’s similar to Thunda.com: Blueworld “photographers” cover various clubbing scenes, and then upload the pics to the site. Vrinne is another social network aimed at connecting South Africans from around the world. It’s still a work in progress though, and offers only basic features at the moment.

MyGenius and BizJam are geared towards young entrepreneurs. It seems like a good way for freelancers and small businesses to market themselves.

GayPeers is another network aimed at connecting the South African LGBT community. It has the usual features: blogging, chats, polls, and video and photo sharing. Judging by the number of blog posts, this social network seems to be quite popular.

Then there’s Digspot and StudentVillage, geared towards connecting university students across campuses. One can catch up on the recent events across universities in the form of news bulletins. StudentVillage seems to be more interactive though, due to its live chat option and classifieds section.

My personal favourite is ZoopedUp, a social network for car lovers. Members can create their own “cyber garages”, share pics and videos, and chat about everything automotive on blogs or forums.

Local vs. Global

Despite the variety of local social networks available, South Africans don’t seem to be using them that much. I had a look at South Africa’s Alexa ratings this morning, and Facebook and MySpace featured in the top 20 of the most popular sites in the country. None of the local social networking sites above made the list.

A possible reason for this could be that users simply prefer the “global original” rather than the local equivalent. I’ve joined the BlueWorld and StudentVillage networks, but their novelty has already off for me because none of my friends are members. What’s great about Facebook though is that because its so popular, you’re most likely to find people you know on it, and you can then network with them in a single, convenient space.

While I think social networks like ZoopedUp and BizJam are useful and innovative, those aimed only at South Africans can’t compete with their global counterparts. Partly because of the latter’s colossal appeal, and partly because a South African – or Canadian or Spanish – social network restricts users’ scope of communication. We’re in the age of globalisation, not nationalism, after all.

Blog Debut

Having just completed an academic essay on social media, I could regurgitate the wonder of Web 2.0 and how it has turned users into producers; how social media use blurs the boundaries between media/audience and reception/production; how the new web allows for a reconstitution of… I’ve started to lose you already, right?

The purpose of this blog is to unpack social media for the average web user (that’s me included).  I’m an avid Facebook user and blog reader, but I haven’t given much thought to the medium, and if and how the incalculable hours I’ve spent online have changed anything about me.   

There’s so much that’s already been said about social media, but also quite a bit that hasn’t.  Through a blog series that begins next week, I’ll be looking at a range of social media forms – blogs, social networks, wikis and the rest – and reviewing some of them.  I’ll also consider social media’s general impact, its influence on users’ identity, its utility for businesses and traditional media, and its democratic potential.  All this, I promise, without causing you to keel over your keyboard from boredom.

As I’m proudly South African (except when the electricity cuts off), I’ll also be covering our flourishing social media scene and finding out what the “experts” have to say.

Now excuse me while I go change my Facebook status to, “Qudsiya is now a blogger!”