Langley Secondary School Library

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Bibliothèque de l'École Secondaire Langley

Website Evaluation
LSS Homepage
Web 2.0

Thank you to Joyce Valenza, PHD for the use of the graphic.

WEB 2.0 Connectivism and the Networked Student

The aim of teaching is not only to transmit information, but also to transform students from passive recipients of other people’s knowledge into active constructors of their own and others’ knowledge. The teacher cannot transform without the student’s active participation, of course. Teaching is fundamentally about creating the pedagogical, social, and ethical conditions under which students agree to take charge of their own learning, individually and collectively.
— Richard F. Elmore, Education for Judgment: The Artistry of Discussion Leadership, xvi.

Connectivism is driven by the understanding that decisions are based on rapidly altering foundations. New information is continually being acquired. The ability to draw distinctions between important and unimportant information is vital. The ability to recognize when new information alters the landscape based on decisions made yesterday is also critical.

Principles of connectivism

  • Learning and knowledge rests in diversity of opinions.
  • Learning is a process of connecting specialized nodes or information sources.
  • Learning may reside in non-human appliances.
  • Capacity to know more is more critical than what is currently known
  • Nurturing and maintaining connections is needed to facilitate continual learning.
  • Ability to see connections between fields, ideas, and concepts is a core skill.
  • Currency (accurate, up-to-date knowledge) is the intent of all connectivist learning activities.
  • Decision-making is itself a learning process. Choosing what to learn and the meaning of incoming information is seen through the lens of a shifting reality. While there is a right answer now, it may be wrong tomorrow due to alterations in the information climate affecting the decision.

From elearnspace

Web 2.0 tools tend to have some common themes and concepts:

  • Working together (to develop open-source software, to build collective knowledge such as in the Wikipedia, to make conference calls using Skype, to share tags and favorite Webspaces via Delicious or Furl)
  • Finding and sharing one’s voice (via blogging, videocasting, YouTube, or podcasting to an authentic audience)
  • Responding to the work of others (via blog comments or “talkback” audio recording features or working on one’s own blog)
  • Finding a community (via social networking like Facebook, Myspace, or LibraryThing, or via interactive environments like SecondLife)
  • Expressing oneself in a variety of modalities (audio podcasts, videos, writing)
  • Learning by interacting with content and with peers (all of the above!)

From Kristin Fontichiaro, media specialist with the Birmingham (MI) Public Schools

Rather than saving projects and working with one computer, students and teachers can now save resources, bookmarks, presentations and documents online and retrieve them from any computer. Below are examples of Web 2.0 applications that demonstrate where online technology tools are heading in education and how they can prove useful for students at LSS.

The Next Step - Evolution of Web 2.0 and Social Networking to Web 3.0 and the Semantic Web

Strickland, Marta. (2007) The Evolution of Web 3.0.

 

 
LSS Library 2010