What does 2.0 mean?
The numbering scheme has been borrowed from the software industry, where a .0 version is a major upgrade of the previous version. In other words, e-learning 2.0 should be the first major upgrade, or the second generation, of e-learning. Behind this simplified label are some central ideas of a culture of sharing and collaboration, and a dynamic that frequently causes consumer and producer of information to merge.
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Forget technology for a moment
E-learning in its most established form or definition is usually one- or two-way communication. E-learning and Web 2.0 use new technologies to create virtual learning communities. There is no broad agreement on what e-learning 2.0 looks like. Stephen Downes, who works for the Canadian Research Council, is a major contributor to the debate. In his article "E-learning 2.0" he says:
For all this technology, what is important to recognize is that the emergence of the Web 2.0 is not a technological revolution, it is a social revolution.
We have had an abundance of powerful and flexible online services and software in the last few years that support the 2.0 way of thinking. But the technology itself is no guarantee for major change. A wiki too, for instance, may be used to create an intranet that may only be updated by the human resources department. That is about as un-2.0 as it gets.
What, then, are the social characteristics of a service that is 2.0? I would like to point to three in particular: the collaborative production of knowledge, the admission of an unfinished state, and the right to create your own version.
The production of knowledge is collaborative
The English version of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia is now well past two million articles, and the number increases by the minute. The articles are created and edited collaboratively by its users. Wikipedia remains the ultimate example of the collective act of creation, the collaborative element that is at the very core of Web 2.0 (although Wikipedia has admittedly been around since 2001).
Traditional copyright is centered on the idea of one creator and owner of the rights for any one work. Projects such as Wikipedia challenge this and at the same time make visible what has always been the case: encyclopedias, movies, records and novels; most intellectual works are created in a cooperation between writers, editors, sound technicians, musicians, and other contributors. Obtaining copyright clearance for television shows is notoriously complicated.
This has contributed to a rise of new user licenses in recent years, licenses that better accommodate the sharing of intellectual property. The best known initiative in this field is the Creative Commons project, that has developed a set of licenses with varying degrees of flexibility.
Being in an unfinished state is fine
An increasing amount of services are presented while they are still in so-called beta, traditionally the software test stage before a final product launch. While easily read as "our product isn't finsihed, so you're not allowed to get mad if it doesn't work", this should also involve an invitation for the users to contribute in identifying problems, offering ideas and participating in further developing the product.
A user who takes part in the content creation, learns how development processes work and becomes a more competent user and co-creator. Such competent users may be demanding to deal with, but also useful contributors.
You are free to make your own version
Further development may also take the form of combining services and content sets in new ways. Services such as Flickr, del.icio.us, and YouTube let you upload and share images, bookmarks, and movies, respectively, to their sites and share them there, but also accommodates easy embedding of their content outside of their own site.
This holds true on a user level -- I can easily use content from these sites in an e-learning program or in this article -- but also on a programming level. Through open application programming interfaces (APIs), Flickr, Google Maps and other 2.0 services make it possible for others to build entirely new services on top of their own and using their content. Such remixed services are frequently referred to as mashups.
What is e-learning 2.0, then?
"Web 2.0 is an attitude, not a technology", writes Ian Davis. Davis thinks that 2.0 presupposes services that are open, not just technologically through their APIs, but also socially open, with a possibility to reuse the technology and content in new contexts.
Photo by: Joiseyshowa
Massachusetts Institute of Technology is one prominent example of the latter. Through MIT Open Courseware, lectures and other course material is published online under a Creative Commons lisence that gives users the right to reuse and remix the content -- within certain restrictions.
Weblogs, wikis and web 2.0 services are being used in different kinds of education. This Canadian music teacher is exploring musical e-learning through a multitude of tools:
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In many ways, e-learning 2.0 reclaims elements of classrom and group teaching at its best. It is a more social, more dialogical, at times more personal, form of e-learning.
And then it pushes further by allowing for the active contribution of the learner. The teaching aid is not static, but can embed contributions from users and content from other services, while other services may integrate the teaching aid -- or parts of it. The very definition of teaching aid, learning object, "textbook", becomes less fixed.
Enormous quantities of learning material are already available online. The YouTube archive is full of movie clips of cultural-historical interest. On Flickr you can find pictures of almost anything anywhere in the world. While none of these online services were developed with training in mind, their learning potential is fairly obvious.
Educational institutions and businesses are increasingly faced with students and employees who both use and contribute actively to such media archives and other reference sources. E-learning in general exists on the web, in a context where the active learner is three keystrokes away from fact checking the course or finding additional material in an extra browser tab. E-learning 2.0 acknowledges and takes advantage of this context.
2.0 glossary
- (we)blog - dynamically updated webpage with postings ordered in reversed chronological order. Often more personal than other publications, may be written by one person or a group of contributors.
- wiki - a content management system that allows all visitors or all registered users of a website to make changes to the site content. The best-known implementation of a wiki is Wikipedia.
- mashup - a combination of multiple online services.
- RSS - really simple syndication, a format for subscribing to updates from a weblog or other website. Most web browsers and many e-mail clients now support RSS, there are also dedicated RSS clients.
- tag - indexing term used to categorize content such as articles, movies, pictures, etcetera by users.
- tag cloud - a typical Web 2.0 phenomenon is the "tag cloud" that visualizes the tags in use on a website by applying the largest font to the most frequently used term. The illustration below shows Web 2.0 terminology visualized as a tag cloud.
- folksonomy - user-generated categorization by tagging. A play on "taxonomy", a usually structured set of terms used for categorization.
- podcast - sound or video recordings that can be subscribed to by RSS. While frequently similar to a weblog in sound or living picture, many regular radio programs also make use of this technology to offer subscriptions.
Further reading/references
Article by: Jorunn Danielsen, Mintra as
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