All entries for Wednesday 09 January 2008

On an increasingly large scale Warwick has promoted, and sometimes created, ‘Web 2.0’ technologies for staff and students. The pervasive ubiquity of Sitebuilder, Warwick Forums and Warwick Blogs has encouraged the adoption of new online activities as normal and everyday: social/academic networking; wiki-esque collaborative writing and tagging; keyword and full-text search; blogging; podcasting; eportfolios; news and event services; RSS content aggregation. Independently adopted Web 2.0 services have blended into this potent and sometimes confusing mix: a recent poll of 100 postgraduate students indicated that most were accessing and updating Facebook more than twice a day.

Web 2.0 is not a superficial development. It is not merely a new interface to an old world. It changes the nature of knowing, and hence of knowledge and the known. For any knowledge based business, it is a ‘disruptive technology’ with negative and positive effects. This presentation will examine the nature of this new epistemography, with reference to specific technologies (see above) and established pedagogical practices (listed below).

For example, Web 2.0 might encourage loosely coupled concepts: a rapid turn-over of low-value interchangeable ideas (in ‘the long-tail’), redundant detail, few dependencies, weak identities, decreased ‘situational ambiguity’ (and hence less drive to learn), with many poorly evaluated connections and few enabling constraints. Deep structures and specialisations are eroded by endless waves of decontextualisation, resulting in a wide but shallow sea filled with a multivarious confusion of conceptual and practical species. To cope with this diversification, scattercast teaching and learning replaces more familiar broadcast and narrowcast channels. There are both negative and positive aspects to these changes. The effects may also vary considerably between disciplines; comparisons will be explored through interviews with practitioners and students.

What effects does this Web 2.0 epistemography have upon learning design patterns? Are Web 2.0 technical design patterns incompatible with conventional learning design patterns? How are we (staff and students) adapting to Web 2.0? Are there transferable strategies and techniques that can be recommended? Patterns being investigated include:

Transmit, record, report, verify.
Predict, experiment (risk take), infer.
Cognitive apprentice.
Adopt, perform and test a perspective.
Perspective switching.
Build a product/text.
Reflective learning diary.
Peer review.
Practice/evidence based competency development.
Last-minute mash-up.