Learning, Unlearning, and Relearning - E-Infrastructures and Technologies for Lifelong Learning - page 307

cognitively aware so they are able to evaluate the
information they access; this involves differing
levels of critical judgment and requires the abil-
ity to be both critical readers and hyper-readers
(Burbules & Callister, 2000b). Critical readers
have specific questions or goals in mind when
accessing information online. Critical readers
gather information, and select, evaluate and
judge the acquired information in relation to
their predetermined needs. Hyper-readers, more
often than not, transform their own inquiry as
they build links and connections between and
among acquired information. Hyper-readers are
also able to read across links, and can use links
in ways that redefine, enhance or otherwise alter
the information presented.
Involving students in resource sharing activi-
ties using Web 2.0 technologies can help them
develop and enhance metacognitive skills associ-
ated with the critical reading and hyper-reading
needed to use the Web as a source for lifelong
learning. Three of the more popular Web 2.0
resource-sharing tools are:

subset of the greater contributing community, or
available to everyone. Active participation in a
resource-sharing community, like those supported
by Flickr, Slideshare, and Diigo, requires students
to use both critical reading and hyper-reading
skills. The “publicness” of students' contributions
encourages them to carefully select, evaluate, and
judge the content they upload for community
use. Once uploaded, to fully realize the poten-
tial usefulness of the new and existing content,
students must explore other uploaded resources,
looking for and establishing new connections and
enriching the knowledge base of resources for
the community as a whole; this activity requires
hyper-reading skills.
In our postsecondary online courses, we use
all three of these resource-sharing tools to support
the dialogue and collaboration needed to help
students develop as lifelong learners. Below, we
share a couple of examples of our use:

• Presentation Prowess project. For the
Presentation Prowess project, our postsec-
ondary students create a presentation slide-
show that contributes something new and
of value to the community of practice and
is worthy of winning SlideShare's “World's
Best Presentation” contest. To determine
what they can create that contributes some-
thing new and of value to the community,
students have to use their metacognitive
skills to critically read and evaluate ex-
isting presentations. Once they have de-
termined they have something unique to
contribute, they create their presentations.
Once the project is complete, students post
their presentations to SlideShare (or other
resource-sharing Web 2.0 tools, such as
Slideboom, YouTube, Dailymotion, Prezi,
or Voicethread). By posting their work
publicly, students engage in dialogue with
course colleagues and practitioners about
their presentation via SlideShare's com-
menting feature. In addition, this project

• Flickr (http://www.flickr.com), an online

photo management and sharing application;

• Slideshare (http://www.slideshare.net), an

application for sharing PowerPoint presen-
tations, Word documents, videos and zip-
casts; and

• Diigo (http://www.diigo.com), a social

bookmarking tool.

These three tools have similar interfaces and
functionality. In cooperation and collaboration
with others, people locate and/or create content
that they then contribute in an organized and cross-
categorized way to a common, shared forum. These
shared resources are then available for use by the
contributor and other participants. It is important
to note that two of these applications—Flickr and
Slideshare—also enable contributors to specify
levels of accessibility and use, making it pos-
sible to upload content that is only available to a