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most profound impact of the Internet, an impact that has yet to be fully realized, is its ability to support and expand the various aspects of social learning. What do we mean by “social learning”? Perhaps the simplest way to explain this concept is to note that social learning is based on the premise that our understanding of content is socially constructed through conversations about that content and through grounded interactions, especially with others, around problems or actions. The focus is not so much on what we are learning but on how we are learning.5

This perspective shifts the focus of our attention from the content of a subject to the learning activities and human interactions around which that content is situated. This perspective also helps to explain the effectiveness of study groups. Students in these groups can ask questions to clarify areas of uncertainty or confusion, can improve their grasp of the material by hearing the answers to questions from fellow students, and perhaps most powerfully, can take on the role of teacher to help other group members benefit from their understanding (one of the best ways to learn something is, after all, to teach it to others).

This encourages the practice of what John Dewey called “productive inquiry”—that is, the process of seeking the knowledge when it is needed in order to carry out a particular situated task.

ecoming a trusted contributor to Wikipedia involves a process of legitimate peripheral participation that is similar to the process in open source software communities. Any reader can modify the text of an entry or contribute new entries. But only more experienced and more trusted individuals are invited to become “administrators” who have access to higher-level editing tools.8

by clicking on tabs that appear on every page, a user can easily review the history of any article as well as contributors’ ongoing discussion of and sometimes fierce debates around its content, which offer useful insights into the practices and standards of the community that is responsible for creating that entry in Wikipedia. (In some cases, Wikipedia articles start with initial contributions by passionate amateurs, followed by contributions from professional scholars/researchers who weigh in on the “final” versions. Here is where the contested part of the material becomes most usefully evident.) In this open environment, both the content and the process by which it is created are equally visible, thereby enabling a new kind of critical reading—almost a new form of literacy—that invites the reader to join in the consideration of what information is reliable and/or important.

But viewing learning as the process of joining a community of practice reverses this pattern and allows new students to engage in “learning to be” even as they are mastering the content of a field.

Mastering a field of knowledge involves not only “learning about” the subject matter but also “learning to be” a full participant in the field. This involves acquiring the practices and the norms of established practitioners in that field or acculturating into a community of practice.

Another interesting experiment in Second Life was the Harvard Law School and Harvard Extension School fall 2006 course called “CyberOne: Law in the Court of Public Opinion.” The course was offered at three levels of participation. First, students enrolled in Harvard Law School were able to attend the class in person. Second, non–law school students could enroll in the class through the Harvard Extension School and could attend lectures, participate in discussions, and interact with faculty members during their office hours within Second Life. And at the third level, any participant in Second Life could review the lectures and other course materials online at no cost. This experiment suggests one way that the social life of Internet-based virtual education can coexist with and extend traditional education.

Digital StudyHall (DSH), which is designed to improve education for students in schools in rural areas and urban slums in India. The project is described by its developers as “the educational equivalent of Netflix + YouTube + Kazaa.”11 Lectures from model teachers are recorded on video and are then physically distributed via DVD to schools that typically lack well-trained instructors (as well as Internet connections). While the lectures are being played on a monitor (which is often powered by a battery, since many participating schools also lack reliable electricity), a “mediator,” who could be a local teacher or simply a bright student, periodically pauses the video and encourages engagement among the students by asking questions or initiating discussions about the material they are watching.

John King, the associate provost of the University of Michigan

For the past few years, he points out, incoming students have been bringing along their online social networks, allowing them to stay in touch with their old friends and former classmates through tools like SMS, IM, Facebook, and MySpace. Through these continuing connections, the University of Michigan students can extend the discussions, debates, bull sessions, and study groups that naturally arise on campus to include their broader networks. Even though these extended connections were not developed to serve educational purposes, they amplify the impact that the university is having while also benefiting students on campus.14 If King is right, it makes sense for colleges and universities to consider how they can leverage these new connections through the variety of social software platforms that are being established for other reasons.

The project’s website includes reports of how students, under the guidance of professional astronomers, are using the Faulkes telescopes to make small but meaningful contributions to astronomy.

“This is not education in which people come in and lecture in a classroom. We’re helping students work with real data.”16

HOU invites students to request observations from professional observatories and provides them with image-processing software to visualize and analyze their data, encouraging interaction between the students and scientists

The site is intended to serve as “an open forum for worldwide discussions on the Decameron and related topics.” Both scholars and students are invited to submit their own contributions as well as to access the existing resources on the site. The site serves as an apprenticeship platform for students by allowing them to observe how scholars in the field argue with each other and also to publish their own contributions, which can be relatively small—an example of the “legitimate peripheral participation” that is characteristic of open source communities. This allows students to “learn to be,” in this instance by participating in the kind of rigorous argumentation that is generated around a particular form of deep scholarship. A community like this, in which students can acculturate into a particular scholarly practice, can be seen as a virtual “spike”: a highly specialized site that can serve as a global resource for its field.

I posted a list of links to all the student blogs and mentioned the list on my own blog. I also encouraged the students to start reading one another's writing. The difference in the writing that next week was startling. Each student wrote significantly more than they had previously. Each piece was more thoughtful. Students commented on each other's writing and interlinked their pieces to show related or contradicting thoughts. Then one of the student assignments was commented on and linked to from a very prominent blogger. Many people read the student blogs and subscribed to some of them. When these outside comments showed up, indicating that the students really were plugging into the international community's discourse, the quality of the writing improved again. The power of peer review had been brought to bear on the assignments.17

for any topic that a student is passionate about, there is likely to be an online niche community of practice of others who share that passion.

Finding and joining a community that ignites a student’s passion can set the stage for the student to acquire both deep knowledge about a subject (“learning about”) and the ability to participate in the practice of a field through productive inquiry and peer-based learning (“learning to be”). These communities are harbingers of the emergence of a new form of technology-enhanced learning—Learning 2.0—which goes beyond providing free access to traditional course materials and educational tools and creates a participatory architecture for supporting communities of learners.

We need to construct shared, distributed, reflective practicums in which experiences are collected, vetted, clustered, commented on, and tried out in new contexts.

An example of such a practicum is the online Teaching and Learning Commons (http://commons.carnegiefoundation.org/) launched earlier this year by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching

The Commons is an open forum where instructors at all levels (and from around the world) can post their own examples and can participate in an ongoing conversation about effective teaching practices, as a means of supporting a process of “creating/using/re-mixing (or creating/sharing/using).”20

The original World Wide Web—the “Web 1.0” that emerged in the mid-1990s—vastly expanded access to information. The Open Educational Resources movement is an example of the impact that the Web 1.0 has had on education.

But the Web 2.0, which has emerged in just the past few years, is sparking an even more far-reaching revolution. Tools such as blogs, wikis, social networks, tagging systems, mashups, and content-sharing sites are examples of a new user-centric information infrastructure that emphasizes participation (e.g., creating, re-mixing) over presentation, that encourages focused conversation and short briefs (often written in a less technical, public vernacular) rather than traditional publication, and that facilitates innovative explorations, experimentations, and purposeful tinkerings that often form the basis of a situated understanding emerging from action, not passivity.

In the twentieth century, the dominant approach to education focused on helping students to build stocks of knowledge and cognitive skills that could be deployed later in appropriate situations. This approach to education worked well in a relatively stable, slowly changing world in which careers typically lasted a lifetime. But the twenty-first century is quite different.

We now need a new approach to learning—one characterized by a demand-pull rather than the traditional supply-push mode of building up an inventory of knowledge in students’ heads. Demand-pull learning shifts the focus to enabling participation in flows of action, where the focus is both on “learning to be” through enculturation into a practice as well as on collateral learning.

The demand-pull approach is based on providing students with access to rich (sometimes virtual) learning communities built around a practice. It is passion-based learning, motivated by the student either wanting to become a member of a particular community of practice or just wanting to learn about, make, or perform something. Often the learning that transpires is informal rather than formally conducted in a structured setting. Learning occurs in part through a form of reflective practicum, but in this case the reflection comes from being embedded in a community of practice that may be supported by both a physical and a virtual presence and by collaboration between newcomers and professional practitioners/scholars.

The building blocks provided by the OER movement, along with e-Science and e-Humanities and the resources of the Web 2.0, are creating the conditions for the emergence of new kinds of open participatory learning ecosystems23 that will support active, passion-based learning: Learning 2.0.

As a graduate student at UC-Berkeley in the late 1970s, Treisman worked on the poor performance of African-Americans and Latinos in undergraduate calculus classes. He discovered the problem was not these students’ lack of motivation or inadequate preparation but rather their approach to studying. In contrast to Asian students, who, Treisman found, naturally formed “academic communities” in which they studied and learned together, African-Americans tended to separate their academic and social lives and studied completely on their own. Treisman developed a program that engaged these students in workshop-style study groups in which they collaborated on solving particularly challenging calculus problems. The program was so successful that it was adopted by many other colleges. See Uri Treisman, “Studying Students Studying Calculus: A Look at the Lives of Minority Mathematics Students in College,” College Mathematics Journal, vol. 23, no. 5 (November 1992), pp. 362–72, http://math.sfsu.edu/hsu/workshops/treisman.html.

In the early 1970s, Stanford University Professor James Gibbons developed a similar technique, which he called Tutored Videotape Instruction (TVI). Like DSH, TVI was based on showing recorded classroom lectures to groups of students, accompanied by a “tutor” whose job was to stop the tape periodically and ask questions. Evaluations of TVI showed that students’ learning from TVI was as good as or better than in-classroom learning and that the weakest students academically learned more from participating in TVI instruction than from attending lectures in person. See J. F. Gibbons, W. R. Kincheloe, and S. K. Down, “Tutored Video-tape Instruction: A New Use of Electronics Media in Education,” Science, vol. 195 (1977), pp. 1136–49.

First, this is not actually a philanthropic endeavor in the classic sense of "donating" something to those with less. Instead, the open education movement promotes conditions for self-empowerment, and one of the central premises of the movement focuses on the freedom to be educated in the manner of one's choosing. Second, the permissions granted in defining an open educational resource explicitly enable the localization and adaptation of materials to be more locally appropriate. Every person should have the right to be educated in his/her native language, and in a manner that is most suitable to the personal and cultural contexts in which they reside. Third, we have good reason to believe that the contributions to the global open educational enterprise from those in resource-limited settings are at least as valuable as contributions from anyone else. While we have much to do to enable truly equitably participation among all of the citizens of the globe, there is widespread agreement that the ultimate goal is some type of open educational network, not a unidirectional pipeline.

educational resources commissioned and paid for directly by the public sector should be released as open educational resources. This ensures that the taxpayers who financed these resources can benefit from them fully. Of course, this principle cannot extend to resources paid for indirectly with public funds, such as materials written by professors at public universities. The Declaration does strongly encourage these professors and institutions to make all of their resources open. However, in the end, this is their choice.

resources should be licensed to facilitate use, revision, translation, improvement and sharing by anyone

many of the participants advocated for inclusion of language that indicates that the license should ideally impose no legal constraints other than a requirement by the creator for appropriate attribution or the sharing of derivative works. This degree of openness represents the 'gold standard' in open educational resource licensing. However, it is also recognized that some authors and publishers may wish to disallow commercial uses (non-commercial). Resources licensed with this additional restriction are still open educational resources, but do come with risks and costs.

we suggest that you use one of the Creative Commons (CC) licenses, for several reasons: The licenses have human-readable deeds, which is (generally) easier for people to understand.The licenses have a computer-readable component which enables search and filtering by license status, an increasingly important consideration in an era of exploding online content.The licenses have been ported to many countries around the world, with more being added every year, which guarantees their worldwide application and enforcement.The licenses are already the most frequently used licenses for open educational resources, which will make it easier for users to learn about their rights, as well as use the materials in interesting ways.

Open educational resources licensed using CC-BY have no restrictions on use beyond attribution for the original creator. Open educational resources licensed using CC-BY-SA also require attribution, but have the additional restriction of requiring that the derived material be licensed in the same manner as the original(s), thus ensuring their continued availability as open educational resources.

n most cases, the NC term is likely to have undesired repercussions for your work. If you are thinking of restricting commercial activity, ask yourself the following questions: What is the goal of doing so? Is it that the creators wish to make money from their contributions? Is this likely? Is it assumed that all for-profit activity is somehow inimical to education? What are the costs of restricting commercial use of open educational resources and do you wish to incur them? For example, is it your goal to forbid a for-profit publisher in a developing country from printing copies of your materials and distributing them there?

If an author's primary purpose in creating open educational resources is for it to be used as widely, freely, and creatively as possible, then using CC-BY is the better choice

CC-BY allows for a variety of motivations, including the possibility of commercial success, to drive users to adapt and re-purpose their materials.

f an author's primary purpose in creating open educational resources is for that material to never leave the educational commons, such as it is, then you may want to apply the SA term. In this case, the possibilities for viable commercial derivatives, though not disallowed, are diminished, and so users motivated to adapt materials for that purpose are unlikely to participate. In addition, open educational resources licensed with an SA term are only interoperable with other SA materials, which seriously limits their capacity for re-mixing.

There are two key points we would ask you to consider prior to applying the ND term. First, are you willing to prevent all of the wonderful ways in which your work might be improved upon just for the sake of preventing a few derivatives that you would consider inferior? It is worth remembering that it is the granting of freedoms to share, reprint, translate, combine, or adapt that makes open educational resources educationally different from those that can merely be read online for free.

you must remember that digital resources are not consumable goods, in the sense that they can be shared infinitely without any loss of value for the original. As such, if inferior derivatives are created, those creations have done nothing to diminish the quality of your original work, which will remain available for others to use or improve upon as they wish.

there is absolutely no restriction on use of public domain materials. In addition to being able to freely use such materials, you are free to adapt public domain materials and then license the derivative works in any way you choose, including standard all-rights-reserved copyright. You have to apply an open license if you want your contribution to add to the pool of open educational resources.

Perhaps the most important breakthrough was Google's willingness to relinquish control of the user-end of the transaction, instead of trying to lock them in with proprietary technology and restrictive licensing

O'Reilly took a second Web 2.0 principle from Peer-to-Peer pioneer BitTorrent, which works by completely decentralising the delivery of files, with every client also functioning as a server. The more popular a file, is, the faster it can be served, since there are more users providing bandwidth and fragments of the file. Thus, "the service automatically gets better the more people use it".

Taking another model from open source, users are treated as "co-developers", actively encouraged to contribute, and monitored in real time to see what they are using, and how they are using it.

"Until Web 2.0 the learning curve to creating websites was quite high, complex, and a definite barrier to entry," says the third of our triumvirate of Tims, Tim Bray, director of Web Technologies at Sun Microsystems.

Web 2.0 takes some of its philosophical underpinning from James Surowiecki's book The Wisdom of Crowds, which asserts that the aggregated insights of large groups of diverse people can provide better answers and innovations than individual experts.

In practice, even fewer than 1% of people may be making a useful contribution - but these may be the most energetic and able members of a very large community. In 2006 1,000 people, just 0.003% of its users, contributed around two-thirds of Wikipedia's edits.

Ajax speeds up response times by enabling just part of a page to be updated, instead of downloading a whole new page. Nielsen's objections include that this breaks the "back" button - the ability to get back to where you've been, which Nielsen says is the second most used feature in Web navigation.

"Everybody who has a Web browser has got that platform," says Berners-Lee, in a podcast available on IBM's developerWorks site. "So the nice thing about it is when you do code up an Ajax implementation, other people can take it and play with it."

Web 2.0 is a step on the way to the Semantic Web, a long-standing W3C initiative to create a standards-based framework able to understand the links between data which is related in the real world, and follow that data wherever it resides, regardless of application and database boundaries.

The problem with Web 2.0, Pemberton says, is that it "partitions the web into a number of topical sub-webs, and locks you in, thereby reducing the value of the network as a whole."

How do you decide which social networking site to join? he asks. "Do you join several and repeat the work?" With the Semantic Web's Resource Description Framework (RDF), you won't need to sign up to separate networks, and can keep ownership of your data. "You could describe it as a CSS for meaning: it allows you to add a small layer of markup to your page that adds machine-readable semantics."

The problems with Web 2.0 lock-in which Pemberton describes, were illustrated when a prominent member of the active 1%, Robert Scoble, ran a routine called Plaxo to try to extract details of his 5,000 contacts from Facebook, in breach of the site's terms of use, and had his account disabled. Although he has apparently had his account reinstated, the furore has made the issue of Web 2.0 data ownership and portability fiercely topical.

when Google announced its OpenSocial set of APIs, which will enable developers to create portable applications and bridges between social networking websites, Facebook was not among those taking part. Four years after O'Reilly attempted to define Web 2.0, Google, it seems, remains the standard-bearer, while others are forgetting what it was supposed to be about.

these spaces conveniently lend themselves to almost seamless integration of content from other online resources, often quite transparently

They are easy to create, and they allow people to jointly collaborate on complex projects using low-cost, simple tools.

The essential attribute of the technologies in this set is that they make it easy for people to share interests and ideas, work on joint projects, and easily monitor collective progress. All of these are needs common to student work, research, collaborative teaching, writing and authoring, development of grant proposals, and more. Using them, groups can collaborate on projects online, anywhere there is Internet access; interim results of research can be shared among a team, supporting illustrations and tables created, and all changes and iterations tracked, documented, and archived. In class situations, faculty can evaluate student work as it progresses, leaving detailed comments right in the documents if desired in almost real time. Students can work with other students in distant locations, or with faculty as they engage in fieldwork.

Support needs are greatly reduced as nothing needs to be installed or upgraded.

A virtual collaborative workspace for a course or study group can be assembled quickly using tools, or widgets, that can pull information from a variety of sources

The same tools can be used to set up a personal portfolio where a student can display his or her work in any form—photos, blog posts, shared videos, and more can be pulled to the page by widgets that grab the student’s contributions on other sites.

Using similar approaches, online conferences and symposia can offer session archives that persist over time; simply request that participants use a particular tag when they post related content, and the widgets will continue to update the conference page as new content appears.

Instead of the campus LMS, the courses use Facebook as their primary interaction and information tool.

A course in Digital Entrepreneurship at Rochester Institute of Technology created a Ning network on the topic, bringing undergrads enrolled in the course into contact with over a hundred graduate students, venture capitalists, faculty, practitioners, and business owners around the world.

An educational technology course at George Mason University uses Pageflakes as the hub of a learning community. Content is dynamically assembled from a variety of timely sources, integrating it with student work from Flickr and other sources, all via RSS.

The Flat Classroom Project (flatclassroomproject.ning.com) uses a Ning workspace to create a sense of space that is shared by students located in the U.S. and in Qatar.

to allow faculty to collaborate on course materials and leverage one another’s work.

Together with the Center for International Understanding, North Carolina in the World is developing partnerships based on digital collaboration between schools in North Carolina and nations ranging from China to Mexico. Teachers and students in partnering schools are learning to use Web 2.0 tools like web-conferencing and wikis to connect kids across continents. Not only do these efforts help to build a general knowledge of other countries in our children, they are providing concrete opportunities to use technology in new ways.

“We suddenly have enough bandwidth, memory and computing power around these net-centric platforms,” he says. This means that the “people-to-people” concept that Web 1.0 wanted to accomplish can be supported, but with software interfaces that make it easier to contribute.

Seely Brown’s project-by-project approach is well-advised. “Start by putting together a decent collection of RSS feeds relevant to your project,” says Bryant. Then, enabling the posting and sharing of bookmarks will help glean knowledge from the project team. Complementing this with blogs will enable people to spend more time on those elements from the bookmarks and feeds that are particularly relevant and need further articulation.

Understanding the difference between consuming newsfeeds and consuming e-mail demonstrates a wider cultural shift that needs to take place in Web 2.0-savvy organisations. Generally, e-mails demand focused attention. They are processed in sequence and each takes a couple of minutes (or more) from your day. Handling newsfeeds and blog posts in that way would make you unproductive, says Bryant. They require a “river of news” approach, in which workers skim large amounts of information for helpful nuggets. Social tagging helps to naturally elevate certain topics above others by making them more popular.Finally, a wiki will help escalate blog discussion to more collaborative working, as needed. This has certainly been Ward’s experience: “The way the sites tend to work is that the blog is where people have a dialogue, but if it moves into more detailed work, it moves into the wiki,” she says.