Rethinking Web 2.0 Learning via Third Space

Web 2.0 technologies are frequently represented as collaborative and interactive tools, and these capacities are particularly attractive to education. This chapter analyses how 26 beginning teachers in Victoria, Australia, used Elluminate Live!® (Elluminate) to support their professional learning. Drawing on Third Space theory and a case study approach, this chapter explores issues around change and emerging technologies. In particular, how beginning teachers appropriate features of this tool to engage in both receptive and collaborative learning spaces, ultimately transforming their professional learning space. It raises numerous issues and challenges for eLearning in the Web 2.0 environment.

Assessment and Learning Partnerships in an Online Environment

This chapter shows how the online environment is used to promote quality teaching within a research project conducted by the Assessment Research Centre at the University of Melbourne. The project investigates how teacher teams use assessment data to inform teaching decisions and extensive efforts are made to check their learning through performance assessment procedures that monitor their discipline and pedagogy skills development. Teachers from the project are involved in a professional development course. The ways in which they adopt the knowledge, skills, and attitudes addressed by the course are tracked, along with assessment data from their students. The online environment is used to deliver the professional development course and to deliver online assessments for students and teachers. The authors are careful to ensure that the online experience for both teachers and students reinforces the ideas of the project. These include the notions of developmental approach rather than deficit, evidence rather than inferential decision making and collaboration rather than isolation.

Managing Expectations

Expectations of, and by, students and staff in the classroom have been well researched. Yet, still there is a gap between the expectations of students and what they experience in their studies. The classroom itself is changing with the introduction of Web 2.0 technologies into the mix. Further changes are being driven by the changing profile of a tertiary student in the twenty first century. Education will not fulfill its goal if the gap in expectations is not addressed. The discrepancy in expectations is explored from the perspective of students and staff and strategies for bridging the gap and enhancing eLearning in the Web 2.0 environment are offered. The chapter begins with a scenario that demonstrates the issues and concludes with suggestions to avoid them in the future. In doing so, the key drivers of change in the learning landscape in Australia are identified and the impact these may have on staff and student expectations is explored.

A Case Study of Designing Experiential Learning Activities in Virtual Worlds

This chapter aims at examining, through a case study, student perceptions of interactive learning activities based on the experiential learning model in Second Life (SL). Undergraduate students in an Honors Program reflected on their learning experiences in a blended learning course that took place both in person and in SL for four weeks. Student reflections on two main learning tasks: discussion about assigned readings and SL field trips which include simulating and gaming, were recorded in weekly journals. Sixty journal entries were the data source for coding. Student experiences of the learning tasks are predominately positive with some challenges. Positive views include: excitement, enhanced confidence, motivation for learning, and increased knowledge. Challenges were mostly due to technical issues. Instructor interventions, including ground rules for online conversation and tech support, were important in minimizing barriers to student learning in virtual worlds.

The Use of HCI Approaches into Distributed CSCL Activities Applied to Software Engineering Courses

This chapter is written as one method to supply the necessary support systems for educational and training design. As such, the authors propose their global development software (GDS) methodology emerges as a revolutionary discipline. It is based on the externalization of software development between geographically distant places in order to reduce development costs. Traditional educational and training process in software engineering must be advocated to consider (or enhance) this new trend, with its respective challenges and necessary skills (multicultural interaction, effective communication, distributed software project management), into curriculums. GDS therefore demands the presence of supporting systems to provide permanent user interaction and enhanced communication tasks. The presence of such interactions is a key aspect to promote the performance and knowledge acquisition processes among globally distributed software development teams. The main goal of such interactions into platforms that support distributed contexts is to reduce the impact generated by the tyranny of distance. This work exposes some human-computer interaction (HCI) principles applied by the authors’ research team in order to structure a supporting user interface environment that reflects the distributed computer supported collaborative learning (CSCL) practice in software engineering. The chapter describes several services that are provided for managing the interaction between participants, such as synchronous interactions through Microsoft © LiveMeeting and Adobe © Connect, and asynchronous interactions such as Moodle forums. In this way, the authors implement effective HCI into educational professional practice scenarios for a distributed CSCL within the specialized domain of software engineering.

Web-Mediated Education and Training Environments

This chapter reviews the concept of personalised eLearning resources in relation to integrating interactivity into asynchronous learning. Personalised eLearning resources are learning resources which are selected to suit a specific student or trainee’s individual learning requirements. The affordance of personalised eLearning would provide educators with the opportunity to shift away from eLearning content that is retrieved and move towards the provision of personalised interactive content to provide a form of asynchronous learning to suit students at different degree levels. A basic introduction to the concept of ePedagogy in online learning environments is explored and the impacts these systems have on students learning experiences are considered. Issues, controversies, and problems associated with the creation of personalised interactive eLearning resources are examined, and suggested solutions and recommendations to the identified issues, controversies, and problems are reviewed. Personalised interactive asynchronous learning resources could potentially improve students’ learning experiences but more research on the human computer interface of these authoring tools is required before personalised eLearning resources are available for use by non-technical authors.

E-Citizenship Skills Online

With Web 2.0 technologies becoming increasingly integrated into all facets of higher education and society, it is vital to use the digital communicative tools and digital media so that students develop appropriate digital literacy and human-computer interaction (HCI) skills to enable them to become participatory citizens in our future society. In this case study, Web 2.0 tools and scenarios for learning are used in learning tasks to connect learners, share ideas, communicate, and co-create content within a university learning environment. The context for the study is social informatics – a composite class comprising 25-30 postgraduate and 3rd year undergraduate students within the Faculty of Information Sciences and Engineering.The study of social informatics examines the impact of technology upon social processes and learning. In order for students to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the topic, they engaged in range of tasks that enabled them to engage in collaborative dialogue and knowledge creation. In this case study, a Moodle mashup (the integration of information from different sources into one Website) is used to amalgamate information from the class and external sources such as blogs, wikis, and Twitter. The integration of HCI and Web 2.0 technologies into the learning process is examined, highlighting how social media tools can improve student engagement, collaboration, and digital literacy and e-citizenship skills.

Bringing Web 2.0 into the Learning Environment

Social Networking, or the so-called Web 2.0 phenomenon, is changing the way we use the Internet. In turn, the way we use the Internet is changing the way we work, learn, communicate, and research. This chapter outlines a series of issues, tools, techniques, and pedagogy that may lie behind the process to bring social media into a learning environment. It then concludes with a four-year experience bringing these concepts into a senior undergraduate seminar, and offers observations and conclusions about the efficacy of our approach. Social networking has brought the Web into a conversation. Similarly, the chasm between synchronous and asynchronous learning is closing as the classroom becomes one part of a larger, continuous learning experience.

Facilitating Learning by Going Online

This chapter examines the impact of eLearning and Web 2.0 social media in a socially conservative environment in Indonesia that has nevertheless proven surprisingly adroit at change management. Web 2.0 social media has proven enormously popular in Indonesia but traditional Islamic schools (which are known in Java as pesantren but elsewhere in the Muslim world as madrasah) the focus of this study is often unable to access Web 2.0 or the Internet in general. Progressive non-national government organizations (NGOs) seek to remedy this situation by providing satellite broadband links to remote schools and this chapter examines one particular project. Despite the impoverished and conservative nature of their community, the leaders of this school have led their students in a surprisingly enthusiastic reception of eLearning technology, recognizing its great capacity to produce and enhance social networks and provide new opportunities for learning. Particular attention in this case study is given to factors relating to social capital, attitudes, and patterns of behavior in leadership and change management. A case study approach was chosen to enable a richer and more finely-grained analysis of the issues. The case study is based on semi-structured interviews and observations conducted over several years. This research shows that whilst the adoption and uptake of eLearning with emerging technologies is strongly shaped by cultural and social factors, it plays out in very different ways than might first have been expected.

Wiki-Mediated Peer Review Process

The focus of this chapter is to explore if the collaborative potential offered by wikis translates into actual practice. The study examines the peer review process of 20 groups of English as a foreign language (EFL) students from two classes, i.e. a paper-based class and a wiki class, of a Bachelor of Arts (BA) in a Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) programme in a large university in Central Vietnam. Data analysis shows that the user-friendly wikis afford learning opportunities in two levels of analysis, namely participation and interaction, which lead to a high degree of information synthesis in the collaborative learning process. In terms of quantity, the multi-way nature of wiki-based exchanges confirms its characteristic of an architecture of participation. Likewise, the quality of the online peer review process is confidently affirmed in all three themes of collaborative interaction, i.e., socioaffective, organizational, and sociocognitive. It is concluded that the online platform of wikis turns the peer review process into a networking of both the academic and the social, and that wikis support a non-linear nature of collaborative learning.