web 2.0 | Tom's Two Cents

Open Education Tools: The affordances of openness

January 18th, 2011 4 comments

Paper list of BBS numbers laying on a keyboard. Top of page says, "Don't Modem Without It!"

Old BBS list. "Don't Modem Without It!" CC-BY believekevin

I remember back in the old days, in the early 90′s, when the Internet still seemed like a fad to most people. Back before America Online started flooding the world with its endless stream of AOL CD offers, and you couldn’t just assume everyone had email. Back in the days of dial-up. Back then, posting something online was reserved for computer geeks. It was a real novelty to have your own website, and it usually required special software and special access to a server. More and more people we getting online, but mostly just to read content. Producers were different than users.

The advent of many Web 2.0 sites blurred the lines between Internet consumers and producers. Sites like Blogger, Flickr, Facebook, and Twitter allow us to easily post our own content to the web. A host of web-based tools became simple enough to facilitate sharing, and the web hasn’t been the same since. Now we expect to be able to leave a comment or a rating almost everywhere we go online – even as we read the day’s new. The Internet has gone from being a one-way street (producer to consumer) to a four-way street (producer to consumer, consumer to producer, consumer to consumer, and producer to producer). Or you could say that we have all now become online content producers. Many online retailers allow users to share customer reviews to help steer others away from poor quality products and towards better values.

So what caused the shift to Web 2.0? Most folks probably would have commented or blogged sooner if the means to do so had existed. It seems obvious that if there were no comment boxes on web pages, there would be no comments. The comment box adds that affordance, to use Don Norman’s term. The same is true for Amazon’s video reviews and many other new ways we as users are now able to share our perspectives online.

Now let’s apply a similar logic to Open Education and ask some questions. At the end of a most excellent 2010 Open Education conference, David Wiley talked about what open licensing does for content. He asked us to set aside the digital nature of the content and think about the specific affordances of the open license. I think the idea is that understanding the specific affordances of open licensing allow us to better understand the nature of Open Educational Resources. Here’s a quick list of the affordances of openness:

tracking content use
- keeping track of licenses for reused content
allowing practitioners and students to create and modify derivative works more easily
providing accessible formats (derivative works) and allowing others to do the same
others?

So how can we make it easy for newcomers to engage? Let’s face it, most educators don’t know or care about using RDFa to embed a Creative Commons license, in the same way that most bloggers today don’t know or care about inserting an image using HTML.

If you know of software, web sites or tools for creating or sharing OER that are particularly useful and easy to use, please add a comment below. Are the current tools good enough or do we need better ones?

Categories: OER, Openness Tags: affordances, open licensing, web 2.0

Let’s Ban Paper Too: What Public Schools 1.0 Can Learn From Web 2.0

April 8th, 2010 No comments

Let me start with a video clip. I came across this video by Soomo Publishing, a group I learned at the Connexions 2010 conference. (Soomo is in the business of creating “ready-to-use collections of rich web assignments” using a student subscription model.) Soomo takes some liberties at the end of the video, so if you’re a dyed-in-the-wool historian you may want to skip over this one.

I think this clip is brilliant.

It is exactly this kind of virally catchy, think-outside-the-box content that can pique students’ interest in a particular historical event.

But this is only a hook.

With the proper questions and encouragement, a teacher can help students unpack the meaning of something like the Soomo clip on the American Revolution. Video is not just entertainment. Viewing the clip can lead to some interesting classroom discussions if the teacher is willing to listen as well as lecture. Master teachers are able to adapt last year’s lesson to this year’s students. This kind of teaching takes more effort than one-way lecture because it requires giving students more control, more two-way interaction.

That’s the whole point of Web 2.0.

Web 2.0 gives users more control. It’s a 2-way “conversation” that starts with a web page projecting information in one direction and allows the audience to respond with comments, ratings, user-generated video, status messages, etc. Some of the most successful sites have figured out how to give their users more of a voice. They are no longer simply readers, viewers, or users. They are contributors. Schools can learn a great deal from the Web 2.0 movement. People (including students) want to participate, not just watch or read.

Don’t stop there.

I think it would be great if students could dig into some of the great online sources to research and collaboratively create a reenactment of a particular historical event. A project I am involved with is helping teachers to do just that. TwHistory.org helps teachers, students, and history enthusiasts to create historical reenactments using Twitter. More info for teachers is available on the TwHistory teacher’s corner. Are you concerned about the implications of using Web 2.0 tools in schools? So am I. These tools have huge potential. I would even compare it to the invention of paper.

Let’s ban paper too.

Blocking Twitter, YouTube, and other social media sites is like banning access to paper in schools because it could be used to read, write, or draw something inappropriate. I taught at a public high school, in a computer-based classroom for 5 years. I understand the issues. Educational consultant Chris O’Neal said it well at the start of a YouTube teacher tutorial he made for Edutopia: “I think of YouTube as, like a giant video flea market. Lots of cool finds mixed in with a lot of crazy junk.” So let’s start by unblocking YouTube in schools (or perhaps finding a suitable alternative, such as TeacherTube, SchoolTube, or Edublogs TV). Social media sites like YouTube are today’s creative canvas.