Seminar: Nothing New Under the Sun
Perth, Australia, 07 May 2007

I’ve just given a seminar presentation entitled Nothing new under the sun? Eight ‘new’ technologies in the service of ‘old’ ideals as part of UWA Teaching Month. In it, I explored the emergent web 2.0 and its relevance to today’s classrooms, focusing on eight interrelated technologies (the first of which predates web 2.0, though it’s fundamentally aligned with it in spirit):

• VLEs (esp. asynchronous discussion boards)
• blogs
• wikis
• new search facilities (incl. searchrolls & blogsearches)
• folksonomies
• rss
• m-learning
• virtual worlds

It was a fairly practically oriented presentation, covering the ease of setting up each technology as well as its range of educational applications. I suggested that appropriate use of social web technologies can enormously enhance our teaching, allowing us to pursue long-established educational ideals in a way that will appeal to today’s students.

After the presentation, two audience members spoke to me individually. Both were interested in what one called the “dark side” of e-learning, a point I hadn’t addressed in much detail. In fact, I spent much of last year talking about the dark side of e-learning at conferences (Cyprus) or writing about it (Brave New Classrooms), so this year’s presentations represent a switch of emphasis!

These questions raise an interesting point, though: how careful do educators have to be when starting out with this technology in order to avoid potential traps and pitfalls?

It seems to me that the main pitfall is a lack of balance, something I addressed in my seminar from a different angle. After all, as suggested by Stephen Bax in his work on normalisation (see summary by Sophie Ioannou-Georgiou), if we are to use computers appropriately in the classroom or anywhere else, we need to stop fetishising them and seeing them either as magic bullet solutions to all our problems, or alternatively as the cause of all our problems. Rather, we need to see them as tools. Like all tools, they do some things very well, some things reasonably well, and some things poorly or not at all. For me, the greatest danger in employing e-learning tools is to overemploy them: to imagine that we must replace everything we’ve done previously with new, e-learning-centric modes of teaching and learning.

Web 2.0 provides us with a whole suite of tools, different combinations of which will be appropriate in any given context. And there are other contexts where it’s appropriate not to use e-learning tools at all, or to use them in conjunction with more traditional face-to-face methods. The role of educators is to be informed about the possibilities and to make judgement calls, ideally in collaboration with students, to suit each individual situation.

Tags: e-learning, web 2.0