Must read articles on 'learning 2.0'

As someone who's about to start a teaching career I find these articles very interesting just as I've learned a lot from the Praxis blog and the comments there. The only thing that leaves me wondering is how people outside teaching enviroments will react to these ideas. Schools and teaching are ideological battlegrounds and I'm not sure the new ideas will be accepted any time soon.

Coincidentally, I was debugging my "Web 2.0 Learning tool" on Ken's Praxis blog when he posted the Learning 2.0 conference info. Since I'm a technologist, and not a teacher, the Learning 2.0 info got me thinking about how it relates to Web 2.0 technologies. Although Web 2.0 doesn't have a specific definition, at the highest layer it's generally thought of as facilitating online communities and the sharing of information ("the web as a platform"), in contrast to Web 1.0 which was generally just accessing static data on a remote computer. I think great examples of Web 2.0 learning tools are: - Wikipedia (user generated content) - Chinesepod (message boards with user generated info, access to remote teachers, the Wiki...) - Rikai and Popjisyo (I think dynamic language segmenters are great examples of Web 2.0 learning tools, since they allow access to data from many sources, and the popup "tooltips" are highly dynamic) - Skype (using the Internet as a pipe, to inexpensively talk to tutor in China for example). Hopefully Web 2.0 technologies will continue to be pushed within learning, to provide: 1) learning experiences that are tailored to the student (the 30 students in my Chinese 101 class are obviously not all the same level) 2) access to more appropriate teachers/peers (in Chinese 101, did practicing pronunciation with the beginning student next to me really make sense? Especially when there are millions of native Chinese speakers just a Skype call away?) 3) REINFORCMENT. Reading my New Practical Chinese Reader is helpful, and I found a few books at the bookstore that I can stumble slowly through with my dictionary - but what I really need is to read some of the millions of online Chinese articles and news reports, with a dynamic translator function built right into the tool. Plus, I need to interactively chat with real Chinese speakers, many of which I've found are anxious to practice their English. And the best thing about Learning 2.0 will be that with the currently available tools, systems can be built for a fraction of the cost of building a single physical school. Many Web 2.0 sites have been created by a couple of people in a few months, and some by a single person over a long weekend. And hopefully my tool can help when it's more stable(www.browsepal.com if anyone is interested). The idea is that a tutor in another country could use to tool to dynamically share web content with a remote student (or students). My thought was that it would make a great supplement to Skype calls, but I guess I'll find that out once it's in use.

None of the 10 points that Fryer bases his definition of "learning 1.0" has anything to do with technology. Those "Learning versions" are utterly IT-invariant. In fact you do not need any IT tool to change the situation. I would even go as far that it is easier to do good teaching offline, given that you are provided enough ressources (read: teaching stuff / student ratio). What the web mainly enables is a nice mix of efficiency, reachability, and "interlinkability". The rest is all wetware.

ups: it should read "teaching staff", but maybe "teaching stuff" is not that far off either ;)

Henning, I totally agree. The scenario he described sounds like a 19th century factory and a gross generalization. There are actually teachers who still think and act that way (especially in China) but there are teahcers who are far more open - in language teaching the communicative methood that emerged in the 60s already destroyed the old notions. In terms of an overall seep, however, I think it's a reasonable contrast between learning 1.0 and learning 2.0 thinking.

I may be doing gross generalization myself by saying this but it seems to me that a lot of people, especially those who have no contact to formal teaching or learning, are still thinking about teaching and learning in these terms (learning 1.0) and for many reasons are not open to new ideas. Trying to clarify this way of thinking is a way to start a discussion and understand why the news ideas are met with resistance and maybe find some middle ground.

One thing I know is that Henning is probably an outstanding teacher! I would argue that he is exceptionally enlightened - unfortunately many teachers are not so.

I hope you didn't read my last comment as an attack on Henning. I'm only trying to point out that to me there seems to be a discrepancy between the popular thoughts about teaching and what is actually going on in modern schools.

Uiuiui, I am not sure about my personal teacher qualities, but thanks for the confidence. ;) What I consider the most important factor, however, is that you are not done after conceiving some nifty pedagical concepts. You also need the to apply them in a real life environment. It is one thing to discuss about a learner-centered, team-oriented, and highly interactive teaching approach and implementing that within unpopular mandatary courses of 120 students...especially when you get additional administrative workload and constant reminders that teaching performance is actually totally career-irrelevant - all that counts are publications. Exactly that is the situation within most Universities world wide. It is a matter of ressources and priorities. But I am convinced that even under those limiting conditions you can successfully pursue a modestly "modern" teaching approach (maybe "teaching 1.5").

Henning, I think you're describing the very problem that I'm trying to get to. I'm a newbie in more than one way and still need to think a lot of this through for myself so it can be difficult for me to express myself precisely.

There will certainly be resistance to the new technologies. Some of it will be legitimate criticism, the rest will simply be stubborn resistance. I very much agree with the type of outlook that both authors express, but I accept that it is early days and thye could be wrong on a number of points. Havingf said that I don't agree wi th them on every point. I'm suspicious when political ideology meets pedagogy. Wes Fryer talks about Paolo Freire and Ivan Illych and I agree tha there is a link, but I am also strongly opposed to the politics that these chaps espoused. Clearly there is much room for debate!

Last night I attended the opening sessio nforthsi donference and met wit hWesley Fryer. I hope to take up hte discussion with him over the weekend.

Actually I've just done a blog post and a link to a recording of the opening session over at Praxis Blog - http://blog.praxislanguage.com/2007/09/15/learning-20-conference-kicks-off/.

Concordia International School is the sister school to Hong Kong International School http://www.hkis.edu.hk/. Both schools rock and its a dream of mine to teach again at one of them. Thanks for the enlightening info Ken.

Interesting articles Ken. My main interest/focus on Chinese right now is how other westerners in today's fast-paced,listen-to-me! world can learn Chinese enjoyably and effectively. I will definitely be reading what I can from your blogs and the like.

非常非常棒！Ｔｈｉｓ　ｉｓ　ａｗｅｓｏｍｅ　ｓｔｕｆｆ！

Any update for today?

There's been so much going on that almost everyone at the conference has been struggling to get their heads around it. I'll try to write up some thoughts tonight.

still processing everything. i do agree with auntysue that these ideas have been around and used for a long time now by some teachers. but the incorporation of technology changes it, can make it more efficient and can speed change. how does it fit for teachers who are just starting? we are in the early days of this and i think it needs to go slow for most teachers. what we cannot allow is for this momentum to stop because we don't see the end of journey and therefore never take our first step. every teacher who was at this conference or reads about it needs to start taking steps (big or small) to do something different, to incorporate what we discussed and to desire to see it develop. we can't wait for someone to draw up the big plan for implementation and stand their motionless like deer caught in the headlights. let's start where we are and just start (or continue) to bring learning 2.0 to the forefront. an interest thing i discovered on the first day of sessions...everyone agreed that learning 2.0 needs to happen, but not everyone agrees on how...the amount of structure provided the learner varies greatly and each proponent very strongly believes he or she is right. i found the contrast rather amusing, especially since they were back to back sessions.

There's a phenomenon here that I'm sure must have a name. A new, superior approach starts to take off, but not as well as it deserves. Some years later, a new technology comes about. The new approach is pinned to that technology. Then the whole packages is presented as being new. Almost instantly, the approach, now some years old, is presented as being not only brand new but also as only possible due to the new technology. The clearly superior pedagogical ideas that you guys are all referring to as learning 2.0, are exactly what I was being taught, exclusively, in my teacher training course in 1991. We were developing and delivering courses that way back then. The web didn't come about until 1993, but we did a lot of that style of learning in classrooms and learning centres, taking students far away from classrooms when possible, and in my case setting up BBS learning environments (pre-Internet). The web, the technical tool, allows more to be done with more people more quickly for less money. This relatively new kind of teaching/learning is the only way to do it to get the best value from the technology, and it's the best kind of instruction anyway. But it's not all that new. The latest round of technical extensions to what web sites can do, make it easier for naive users to to exactly the sorts of things that experienced Internet users were doing as a matter of course from the early 1990s. With the sudden deluge of new users around 1997 who knew little and weren't interested in learning about the net, the population average was seriously dumbed down. It's taken until now to produce user interfaces simple enough that everyone can do all of what we few elites were doing on the net way back in 1992. So bear in mind that the fundamentals are not so new at all, they've been used and proven over the past two decades, and those of us who've been around since then know exactly how good it is. The big thing that's changed recently is that it's now available to everyone who can get on the net, and a lot easier to step into with no background.