Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
more importantly - for the purpose of the current
chapter - on the web.
The term “Web 2.0” is attributed both to DiNuc-
ci (1999) and O'Reilly (2005), and became more
widely known when it was proposed by O'Reilly
during the Web 2.0 conference (O'Reilly, 2005).
Currently it broadly refers to a web development
stage which harnesses the power of the users, in
which (for example) web-based communities and
social networking sites, wikis, blogs, mashups and
folksonomies, are integral parts. The infrastructure
of Web 2.0 (or the “Social Web”) arguably also
permits new means of lifelong learning, where the
learners have not only reading but also writing
access (rating, commenting, contributing with
items, etc.) to communities, which collaborate in
order to achieve specific goals (generally these
goals are for the learners to learn and expand their
knowledge level). These communities provide not
only significant (sometimes also supplementary)
learning material but also facilitate information
sharing and collaboration between experts and(or)
peers (Klamma et al. , 2007). The shift towards the
Web 2.0 (read/write) concept is changing the way
in which content and services are being produced
(Tapscott & Williams, 2006), and in lifelong
learning this change can be seen as a type of com-
munication in which learners can exchange with
their teachers the role of being active and leading
the processes of learning and knowledge construc-
tion (Roberts, 2005). According to Klamma et al .
(2007), some of the key factors of Web 2.0 which
make it a good opportunity for lifelong learning
are as follows.
tion achieves both understanding and a
clear expression of the understanding. This
problem can be ameliorated via dynamic,
changeable privilege settings, depending on
the contribution quality, as we shall show
later on.
2. Various user types and roles. Users in Web
2.0 can be learners (also referred to in this
chapter as students), teachers, authors,
administrators, etc. The Web 2.0 context
allows for all of these roles to interact with
each other, in an ad-hoc, synchronous or
asynchronous manner, appropriate for life-
long learning. These roles all contribute to
the content and knowledge, in various ways
and personalization can be applied to any of
these roles, as will be shown later on.
3. Facilitating collaborative creation, shar-
ing, and commenting on the content . This
moves peer discussion and learning from
the synchronous, curriculum-led classroom
environments, to the more informal and
socially discursive, asynchronous web en-
vironments, where learning can take place
outside of scheduled times, and thus becomes
more amenable for lifelong learning.
4. Augmenting the content in bottom-up and/or
top-down fashion (Carcillo & Rosati, 2007).
In the top-down annotation, the system uses
predefined metadata (generally ontologies)
to index and tag the created content. In the
bottom-up annotation approach, the system
allows the users (individually or in groups)
to annotate the content with freely chosen
tags (keywords). This approach allows for
both teacher recommendations (usually top-
down), as well as peer and student recom-
mendations (bottom up).
5. Emerging groups/communities. This concept
identifies a set of individuals who have
similar interests, goals, etc. In the context
of lifelong learning, where collaborative
settings are more frequent than competi-
tive settings, students may recognize that
1. User generated content. Web 2.0 is based on
the users and the content created by them.
Thus, learners can add to the knowledge
collection using a constructivist learning
approach (Duffy and Jonassen, 1992). A
typical Web 2.0 problem is, however, that a
lot of content may be produced but quality
may be an issue. A constructivist learning
approach will only be useful if the construc-
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