Teaching and Learning with Web 2.0

The answer, simply, is ‘No,’ said Ken Coates, dean of the faculty of arts at the University of Waterloo. Coates recently chaired the learning stream of the Canada 3.0 conference on digital media, held in Stratford, Ont.—the birthing grounds of Waterloo’s newest satellite campus designed to house niche programs in digital media and global business. He said even though the traditional approach to education is still a recent memory in the minds of most Canadians, the country isn’t lagging in a race towards digital academic innovation.

However, there is one exception I would make to this. We don’t have enough innovation in teaching, and it would be good to see faculty, using decent evaluation methods, exploring the potential role of new technologies for teaching and learning. This might require buying some iPads or iPhones just for the purposes of trying them out with a small group of students – provided students are happy to be part of such an experiment, and there is a clear learning strategy behind the choice of the technology.