Web 2.0 Social Spaces and Techno-pedagogical Skills in Pre-service teacher

Web 2.0 Social Spaces and Techno-pedagogical Skills in Pre-service teacher

            Web 2.0 Application by definition is an Architecture of Participation built on the World Wide Web (Richard Monson-Haefel). Web 2.0 is a term describing changing trends in the use of World Wide Web technology and Web design that aims to enhance creativity, information sharing, and collaboration among users. It led to the development and evolution of Web-based communities and hosted services such as social networking sites, video sharing sites, wikis, blog etc (Wikipedia). Increasingly,Web 2.0 has become a topic that dominates discussions related to advances in the Internet. Some suggest that Web 2.0 is a transformed and more advances in the Internet. Others appear critical, but only incremental of Web 2.0 and argue that there is no such thing progression of the Internet to a new level enabled by growth in capabilities of software and hardware technologies. For them, Web 2.0 is meaningless “buzz” word (Daniel Churchill, 2007). In any case, it appears that Web 2.0 is at least a metaphor that signifies the number of novel technologies possibilities that have emerged on the Internet, mostly since the dot-com bubble deflation in 2001. These novel applications under Web 2.0 constitute advances in number of ways from the traditionally predominant uses of the internet as an information-delivery channel.

            Web 2.0 Application often enables users not only to consume but also to create information and contribute to the sites by publishing content. In this context, Web 2.0 is also referred as to “read-write web” (Gillmor, 2004; Richardson, 2006), while a blog is best described as Web-based publication system that allows an ordinary Internet user to create a Web page   consisting of periodical articles (Wikipedia). In general, no sophisticated technical skills are required to create a blog. The final web page can contain text, graphics, animations and other media and provide links to other sites. The general web community or selected group of individuals can read this Web page and add their comments to the articles. As a part from standard text-based blogs, there are other blogs such as linkblogs ( a collection of links maintained by an individual) and a moblogs (blogging with content posted from mobile devices. A blogger is someone who has a personalblog and provides periodical posts, while the blogsphere is the community of bloggers.

            Wiki is also a Web-based publication system, which differs from blogs in that it supports an ordinary internet user to participate in collective publishing activities to produce internet-based informational resources. The best known collection of informational resources developed with wiki is Wikipedia (Wikipedia). Articles in Wikipedia are written by individuals interested in particular topics. Once article is initiated and written in its first version by someone, others are able to edit it and upgrade its content. The system keeps the history of versions of the article, and there might also be some accompanied discussions about the credibility and accuracy of its content.

The widespread of Web 2.0

            A number of innovative web 2.0 applications that have come to notice through the last couple years have been shown to be possibly some of the most socially engaging phenomena in human history. Information from major new sources suggests that currently millions of people across the world visit Web 2.0 sites. These digital end citizens (Katz, 1997) provide their contribution in forms such as multimedia content, blogs, comments and tags that develop new partnership and discover new knowledge from a pool of collective intelligence existing in these environments.

            For example some major new sources report that the You Tube digital video repository, which emerged just over a year ago, attracts more than 25 millions hits a day (Hardy, 2006). It was declared as the invention of the year for 2006. Ordinary internet users have uploaded over 40 millions unique video clips to this site and regularly comment upon, rank, tag and recommended these resources. You Tube was initially set up by three individuals who used their credit card funds as start-up capital where it was acquired late in 2006 by Google in a deal valued at US$1.6 Billion. Similarly, the social networking site My Space reportedly has over US$90 millions members (BBC News, 2006). News Corp acquired it early in 2006 from its original founders, intermix media, for almost US$600 Millions. Google has committed US$900 Millions to My Space for integrating their search engine in its environment.

            Wikipedia is another Web 2.0 phenomenon, housing over 5 million articles in over 100 languages (Wikipedia, 2006) and it is believe to increase rapidly over years. It has become one of the world’s most visited Websites, with millions of hits and thousands of edit and new articles per day (Giles, 2005). Finally, blogs demand mention. Reportedly, blogs have contributed to the enormous growth of internet sites over the last few years. The Web 2.0 site technocrat tracks to be monitoring around logs, and claims to be monitoring around 60 million (Technoratti, 2006) although there are many more on the internet. As many as 75,000 blogs are created everyday, and bloggers (Reynolds, 2006) calls them an army of irregulars – add over 50,000 updates every hour. Reportedly, 8 millions Americans have created a blog (BBC News, 2005), while it predicted in 2006 that by now (2007) there would be up to 60 million bloggers just in China (Reuters, 2006).

Web 2.0 Social Spaces

            Web 2.0 Applications are usually about engaging people in collective activities in a social space where they, for example, converse, exchange resources and ideas or simply have some fun. Examples of web 2.0 social spaces are MySpace and Facebook. It is often suggested than in Web 2.0, individuals benefit from “harnessing the collective inelligence” of communities (O’Reilly, 2005).

            In Web 2.0 Social Spaces, individuals can create, manage, and publish information and resources that they want others to access. This might include blogs, information about favorite’s activities, movies, and bands or images and audio or video clips. Members of such spaces usually identify and connect with other individuals and form sub-communities of interest (Daniel Churchill, 2007). Typically a member has his or her Web page with resources and other content that includes information about friends, with links to their spaces. By visiting a friend’s space, other member can discover “friends of a friend” and expand their network by adding some of these to their spaces.

            Resources sharing and referencing system are another powerful for of Web 2.0 Social Spaces. Examples are YouTube (for sharing video), del. icio. us (for referencing websites), Flickr (for sharing image), Napster (for sharing music), and CiteUlike (for referencing of academic articles). However, these systems are not just about sharing resources and referencing. Usually, such system allows users to add a resource and through this process also to create their own tags or label descriptive of that resources.

            This system also allows individuals to add comments, provide recommendations, and assign a number of stars to the resource indicating its value in some way. These tags and other information surrounding the resource then become useful to others to dig through when searching for resources. Others can locate resources that are tagged with a particular tag, filter out resources that are evaluated with five or fewer stars, or explore resources provided by a particular person. In addition, such websites usually track tags used, including the number of times they were used, and plot this information into a “cloud” of tags which are clickable and linked to resources that use them (Daniel Churchill, 2007). This internet-based information retrieval methodology is referred to by the Web 2.0 community as “folksonomy”.

            In such systems we are also able to access recommendations from the crowd about a resource, explore how the majority values the resource, and by examining tags used by the community to describe that resource, and explore the collective perception of it. It is often said that much information retrieval is amplified by the collective activities of all users of the system, and such environment are spoken of places where individuals can harness the “wisdom of crowds” (Suriowecki, 2005). These systems often allow individuals to subscribe for information, such as when a particular resource that is marked with a particular tag has been added to the collection.

Education and Web 2.0

Although right now it is not clear why Web 2.0 attracts such a higher number of ordinary internet users, fully understanding why people behave as they do is a classical challenge for social sciences. One thing is certain based on the enormous numbers of Web 2.0 Internet users: A large number of students will be coming to our classes with understandings and expectations of technologies aligned with Web 2.0. These understanding and expectations will reflect the world and technology as they know it. In education, we are somehow stuck with a more rigid culture that often results in our being reluctant or slow in adapting (Daniel Churchill, 2007).

            In education, we can learn from Web 2.0 to design a technology-integration strategy that leads to pedagogically more productive engagements meeting the profiles of our students, and being otherwise relevant to the world.  Web 2.0 is often seen as a “paradigm shift” to a new level of human understanding and expectations of the Internet and associated technologies (Daniel Churchill, 2007). An indicator that something is already moving on out there is the emergence of terms such as E-learning”. This shows that the educations nowadays is moving towards and using the most up-to-date technologies to enhance the process of learning.

In education, we can explore the benefits of a social space that supports the sharing of resources for teachers. In Web 2.0 Social Spaces, the system will allow teachers to share, catalog, and reuse digital resources. Surrounding this repository will be a social space. A repository based on Web 2.0 ideas should be in many ways different form and conceptually more advanced than learning object repositories currently promoted (Merlot, 2008). The sharing of resources is not the primary purpose for the existence of a digital repository and social space. Resources are a kind of “carrot on a stick” to bring teachers into a community that is willing to co-exist and contribute (Daniel Churchill, 2007).

The main idea of this system is the social space, where teacher benefit from harnessing the ideas and activities of colleagues. Through discovery of useful pedagogical ideas, sharing of experiences, recommendations, and ranking of resources, and digging through tags and other methods of “community plumbing” within this space, the teacher would contribute and develop their own knowledge and pedagogical expertise, while increasing the base of available resources at their disposal (Merlot, 2008). In this context, the system might serve as a novel and powerful collective intervention strategy, leading to the advancement of teaching and learning.

In education, unless we give serious attention to Web 2.0 development, we could be encountering students who have expectations that are incompatible with our own thinking and the ways we integrate technology into our pedagogical practices. It is also a danger that unless we accommodate Web 2.0 developments in our teaching, we might find ourselves producing students unable to function in the Web 2.0 literate world outside. We need to explore possible implications of Web 2.0 and mobilize resources to research and test applications of these technologies in teaching and learning (Daniel Churchill, 2007).

Techno-pedagogical skills and Techno-pedagogical Exploration

We define technology exposure as something far more than just having students develop skills in particular technology. Technology exposure includes all of the following: integration methods, lab protocol, developing technology skills, and learning how to gather tutorials and learning materials from the internet. Virtual field trips would be an effective method to assist in exposing pre-service teachers to real-life or real-classroom technology integration. Virtual field trip has the potential to target two major areas of common concern in teacher technology preparation. First, they assist in addressing what the best practices are for preparing students to work in a computer lab.

Many of the pre-service teachers were unaware of the basic classroom issues of working with technology. As a result, the virtual field’s trip raises questions for current and future consideration: How do I teach in a lab? What is the best way to structure a lab? How can I facilitate collaborative inquiry in lab? The virtual field trip also has the potential to have students see both exemplary and questionable practices and critically reflect on various applications of technology in classroom. This leads to the second major benefit of virtual field trips by having pre-service teachers develop critical reflection skills (Alain Breuleux & Pat Baker. 1999). Learning to question what is happening when they see technology being used in the virtual trip classroom environments forces pre-service teacher to engage in active, critical, and collaborative reflection.

The example of publishing student work will provide with multiple opportunities to learn new web techniques from advanced students in the classes. Richard (2003) posited that, “I rarely hold a class these days without having students writes a technology autobiography early in the term. I find, consistently, that some students enter the course with, what I would call, advanced literacy skills related to web development. These skills and their access to advanced software and hardware allow them to manipulate and incorporate images, animations, audio, and video clips and place them artfully onto web pages. Or they may have programming skills that allow them to create interactive surveys through which the class might gather information from online visitors.”

Students usually remain open to valuing their new literacy skills, therefore there is no reason why, together, can’t explore and access these new technologies critically. Richard (2003) posited that ‘I usually require that these technically advanced students not only produce materials, interfaces, or media for the class, but also demonstrate how they created these products for the class and show us where other students (and I!) can go to acquire the skill they posses. As a group, we spend time analyzing the rhetorical effectiveness of their web development. How sustainable it is? Who benefits and who excluded from using this new media?

Students can become experts in the class and enhance their techno-pedagogical skills when they learnt by time about next generation web tools and where to go to learn more through Web-based technology exploration. As Richard (2003) stated on his research, “It is difficult for me to keep up with the film and conversation threads in real time. For most students however, it seems to be much less of an issue. They watch the film (It is best to choose one that students have already seen), make observations, talk about others perceptions and relate personal experiences all at once. In essence they are exploring a media experience that is largely beyond their teacher’s ability”.

Building Techno-pedagogical Skills in Pre-service Teacher

            Learning and teaching with technology is hard, it can be overwhelming, and the field is always changing (Jacobsen, Clifford, and Friesen 2001). Although pre-service teachers do have a degree of knowledge with regard to Information and Communication Technologies (ICT’s), but still they have little know-how or techno-pedagogical ability with which to integrate those technologies into their teaching practices (Karsenti, 2001, 35). It is the reason why higher education institute have an eye on developing techno-pedagogical skills in students and it is needed to provide technology integration experiences including selecting and assessing software, hardware, and peripherals as well as approaches to integrative instructional technology for students completing a Bachelor of Education at the University (Alberta, Canada).

            Preparing teachers to use technology effectively is a major area of concern for teacher education. Effective technology use includes such activities as linking curriculum outcomes with various technologies, establishing a learning context of discovery and process in the use of technology, collaborating with others both face-to-face and virtually to achieve learning outcomes, stimulating real world environments and assessing outcomes. In turn, faculty modeling of effective technology use has often been emphasized as a key means of illustrating such activities in teaching education programs. “If pre-service teacher education’s is to make a difference in how teachers use technology, then teacher educators must model effective technology use” (Milligan and Robinson, 2000).

            While we agree that faculty modeling is necessary, though often absent, component of pre-service teacher preparation, it is only one part of developing techno-pedagogically skilled teachers. We must show pre-service teachers how to learn by outlining what process works for combining technology and pedagogy; they need to be exposed to theory and research on technology in order to develop evidence-based instructional strategies and a conceptual framework for integrating and evaluating technology applications (Corey Hadden, 2005). We have heard the argument that effective technology integration should begin with the curriculum area (such as social studies or science) and move to finding technologies (such as spreadsheets or digital imaging) that are appropriate for the given curriculum. This implies that educators should use technologies to assist in effectively and efficiently achieving curriculum objectives. Hadden (2004) attests that technology is best learned within the contexts of applications- that activities, project and problems that replicate real-life situations are among the most effective approaches for learning technology.

            It outlines an approach that encourages pre-service teachers to develop both techno-pedagogical skills and reflective practitioner skills (Corey Hadden, 2005). This process includes exploring features of various technologies, identifying the appropriateness of using various technologies in teaching and learning, and devising methods to infuse these technologies into their teaching and learning. Lorraine Beaudin (2005) posited that students learnt to be cognizant of the fact that we live in a culture of constant change, a technology may be appropriate today but not tomorrow. This philosophy underpins the programs and encourages students to be reflective in their teaching and learning. As Riel and Baker (2000) state, “the rapid speed of technological development brings new computer mediated tools to the classrooms door each year. Teachers have to make continual decisions about how to best utilize these tools in teaching, learning, and assessment”.

Summary

            All uses of technology have a critical edge to them, and as a teacher, they can choose to integrate those edgy moments into classes. Each activity provides learning opportunities for teacher and students during which can thoughtfully explore current changing practices as well as the more traditional, often restrictive, institutional expectations that we all have to live with (Richard, 2005). Web 2.0 Social Spaces can be used as a medium in techno-pedagogical exploration. It can serves as a novel and powerful collective intervention strategy, leading to advancement of teaching and learning (Beaudin L., 2005).

New working contexts require new practices, hence the redefinition of the competence evaluation process, as well as new assessment methods regarding the learning process itself. In order to boost the qualification of teachers and trainers, and educators in general, it is necessary to estab­lish proper contextual learning situations where educators can develop such competences to both learn and mentor their learners, and also peers. This should include new (self-) assessment possibilities, access to relevant information as well as tools for the creation of new content (Volungeviciene and Rutkauskiene, 2006). While Web 2.0 is used in some advanced cases, on the whole, online collaboration and social networking between teacher and student or between students themselves is not yet sufficiently exploited. (Kasperiúniené J., 2007). There are key areas educators should be empowered with to enable them to perform their revised roles as 21st century educators efficiently and effectively. 21st century skills are centred on the development of mentoring and Web 2.0 competences for teaching and learning (Nikolov, 2007; Grodecka, Wild and Kieslinger, 2008). It will not only place them in the 21st century e-skills sphere; it will equally enable them to mentor learners towards their future in a more autonomous, connected and contextual way, while they themselves also develop their own skills and practice.