Well, Hello World is an appropriate title for this first post. It takes me back to my first days as a computer programmer (back in the punch card days, I guess that really dates me). In many respects, what I learned in programming has been overturned by the new Web 2.0 services and applications. I’m having to learn “programming” all over again.
I’ve been interested in Web 2.0 technologies for many months. I’ve dabbled by signing up and briefly trying a number of different ones. But I’ve never spent the time to really use them for collaboration and collaborative learning. This in spite of my strong belief that social and collaborative learning can be a powerful learning experience for students, as compared to an information-transfer model of learning. The current CPsquare Connected Futures workshop is now pushing me to use these new tools, at last.
There is a level of disorientation in appropriating new tools since each new tool provides largely unknown functionality. Because each tool is new there is very little to grasp onto to understand what the tool is for, what problems does it solve or things does it enable. Precisely because these tools are Web 2.0, they offer a new paradigm of exchange and interaction. Yet one is trying to understand them coming from the old paradigm. There are too few clues as to how to learn the new paradigm. I find an analogy to the experience of faculty who have only taught face-to-face as they first attempt to teach online. When they encounter the course management software they simply have no idea what the tool is capable of nor how to translate their current teaching experience into the online mode. While some orientation to the software can help, it is only by using the software (initially, as a student) that they can begin to understand what the software provides.
This disorientation and the difficulty of understanding occurs even though current course management software is quite rigidly course- and instructor-focused, just like most f2f classes. In other words, the paradigm shift is not even as big as the one from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0.
One strategy that might help people overcome the initial disorientation is to prepare some typical use cases and scenarios (coming from the field of interaction design). The idea would be to demonstrate how the tool is used for a particular task. For example, del.icio.us tagging and sharing could be illustrated by an example of finding a resource, tagging it, having someone else find the tag, and so on. Such a case embeds the initial experience within a task that was previously accomplished in more primitive ways (e.g., by sending an email with the URL).
