A new report by JRC on the impact of Web 2.0 tools on education and training in Europe
How and to what extent the take up of very popular Web 2.0 applications such as blogs, wikis, social networks or content sharing sites has been taken into account and become daily practice in education? The study “Review of Learning 2.0 Practices: Study on the Impact of Web 2.0 Innovations on Education and Training in Europe”, authored by Christine Redecker, explores the ways in which “social computing” has entered teaching and learning activities across Europe. The report, which is part of a collaboration project between the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) and its Directorate General for Education and Culture (DG EAC), highlights how the take up of Web 2.0 tools at school, although still slow and in an experimental phase, is laying the basis for “innovative lands for learning” or “iLands”.
The change brought by Web 2.0 tools in the last few years has deeply affected the way of accessing, managing and exchanging knowledge among people, especially youngsters, and the way they interact. As a consequence, also different learning styles are emerging and experiences being carried out, but official education and training systems have not reacted in a structured way yet. Thus, a lot of various small-scale projects and initiatives have been spreading across Europe, which the report identifies and analyses with a view to producing evidence on the impact of social computing for learning and its potential in promoting innovation and inclusion.
Four different Innovative (I) ways of exploiting Web 2.0 tools in education are taking shape:
- Learning and Achieving (LA), when social computing is used as a didactic tool to support and improve learning, thus leading to personalised learning processes;
- Networking (N), when social computing is used as a supporting communication system between students and teachers and among students, thus setting up learning communities;
- Embracing Diversity (D), when social computing is used as a means of integrating learning into a wider community, thus creating alternative channels for improving knowledge and skills;
- Opening up to Society (S), when social computing is used as a tool for making institutional learning accessible and transparent to the whole society, thus involving third parties such as parents and prospective students.
Together, these four approaches constitute “iLands”, which are the “innovative lands for learning”. Six are the areas in which evidence shows they really seem to foster pedagogical innovation: supply and access of learning material; personal knowledge management and resource network building; subject-specific methods and tools; improving personal achievement; personal skills, including affective and social aspects; higher order skills and met-competences.
The full report “Review of Learning 2.0 Practices: Study on the Impact of Web 2.0 Innovations on Education and Training in Europe” is available in the Insight Library at:
http://resources.eun.org/insight/JRC49108.pdf