Bewarethegeek Goes Digital

First post: I’m transposing this over from the UTS Online board.

I found Seeley’s 1999 article particularly interesting from the point of view of someone who’s been very involved in the web, especially watching the developments of web 2.0 over the last ten years.

In terms of changes, one that Seeley mentioned which particularly struck me is the way in which the web is beginning to be seen as new media. In 1999, social networking was yet to boom, I believe youtube hadn’t either and honestly I’m not sure the technology was ready, with cable internet only just beginning to become common. Compare this to what we see today and some would say that the web IS the medium.

Take for example online news. Print newspapers write their stories such that someone with the reading level of the average eleven year old can read them, yet web news stories are written such that someone with the average web attention span (i.e. 30 seconds to 2 minutes) can read them, digest the pertinent points and be done. This shift highlights the start of the acceptance of the web as a new medium. Many online news websites now have bloglike features, for example allowing readers to comment. Seeley suggested that there would be a change to allow consumers to become part producer and I think this is the start of this change.

I also find it interesting that he discusses passion based learning with relation to e-learning and learning on the internet in general. As someone who’s been pretty much obsessed with the internet from a young age, I just wanted to comment that I have never encountered as much passion for various interest groups, subject matter, etc as I have on the internet.

However I wonder about some of the issues arising out of all of this, especially Seeley’s mention of multiple intelligences. As someone fresh out of an undergraduate degree, I can say that not enough of the social changes happening with web 2.0 have filtered through into universites. There is very little value placed on social learning – in fact I recall a tutorial where a group of students I was in were trying to nut a problem out and were asked to be quiet and continue reading our papers. Multiple intelligences were being used here – acting out scenarios, drawing diagrams, yet the “right” way of solving the problem was seeming to be using one intelligence and reading the paper in solitude. Yet I am to conclude that we are in a state of flux -  we can see things changing at the same time – Second Life and virtual classrooms for example. This e-learning subject as another example!

Put simply I think the biggest change is the shift from Web 1.0 to 2.0 but I can see a lot of the problems/challenges raised by Seeley still being very valid today. Technological literacy and navigation literacy is a big one and I wonder if the reason that the web is not being ultilised to its full extent (though we are seeing beginnings of it) as a learning tool is because of a lack of technological literacy. I have had numerous lecturers, none of them old (we’re talking under 40 here) who refused to use powerpoint for their presentations and insisted on writing everything on the blackboard. These lectures were spent copying down notes and I learned nothing. If this is how extreme their fear of learning a new technology is, then it’s not hard to see why authorative, lecture style face to face learning is still the most prevalent form of education, though I agree with Seeley’s implication that it is not the most effective.

With regard to my workplace I feel particularly lucky. I work as a web developer and also run the technical support desk and we have a very open policy in terms of sharing resources. We have two wikis which are continually being updated, one for developers and support staff with various how-tos and fixes for new bugs that come up in the systems. The other is for the users of the websites we produce and how to update their content, add video, set up email and so on. As a team, we share stories constantly to solve problems, similar to the Xerox story that Seeley mentioned and I find this very effective, and educational. I’ve learned more about web systems from the other members of the development team in the few short months I’ve worked there than I have in all the years I’ve done web development alone as a freelancer.

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I was also interested by the comments that Kate and Jennifer left on this thread regarding other students in my age bracket that were not embracing IT and its potential for learning. I found that particularly interesting because, having grown up so “wired in,” as most of my friends also are, I just assume everyone my age is. I have encountered the hesitancy to embrace new technologies with my peers, but I thought it was just the particular students I was working with. For example, I remember in honours we were encouraged to use a referencing program called Endnote to help organise the references in our theses. The faculty provided us with several training workshops for how to use it, but barely anyone went, and the majority of the students opted to handwrite (!!) their reference lists! My mother used to teach IT at TAFE also, so I asked her about her own students and was quite amazed to find that she had students in her classes that had never even owned a computer!

~ by bewarethegeek on March 6, 2009 . Tagged: Addler, EMT1, Seeley-Brown, social networking, Web 2.0