Working with Web 2.0
Web 2.0 and learning
Student teachers find it useful to reflect on some of the ways we learn, or might learn through Web 2.0. The list of skills provided by the MacArthur Report Confronting the challenges of participatory culture: media education for the 21st century (Jenkins et al, 2006) are useful here. We encourage student teachers to extend these reflections by access the full document. But to begin with, this list is useful in prompting discussion:
Play – the capacity to experiment with your surroundings as a form of problem-solving
Performance – the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery
Simulation – the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real world
processes
Appropriation – the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content
Multitasking – the ability to scan one's environment and shift focus as needed to salient details
Distributed Cognition – the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand
mental capacities
Collective Intelligence – the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal
Judgment – the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources
Transmedia Navigation – the ability to follow the flow of stories and information
across multiple modalities
Networking – the ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information
Negotiation – the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms
(Jenkins, et al 2006:56) |
Well what do you know?
Student teachers might not consider themselves to be experts, but our experience is that they quite quickly begin to talk about new practices such as 'changing skins', 'writing on walls', 'messaging', 'apps' and 'tagging photographs', in describing their everyday Web 2.0 literacies.
In research we conducted with teenagers we heard them confidently describing how
'you can just write on their wall really quickly', suggesting that
'it's a convenient thing'. To speak like this is to acknowledge a particular kind of expertise and interactivity as well as to suggest how commonplace it is in lives of young people.
Activity summary – Social networking
- Think about the way you use technology with your friends?
- Have you or do you use – Beebo, Facebook, MySpace or Twitter?
- How do you use these Web 2.0 spaces?
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Through their immersion in communicative environments like Facebook, many young people are now aware of the potential to extend and enrich their social interactions, to maintain a connection with different groups. Our research showed teenagers keeping in touch with
'people from choir' and
'relatives that live in America' and so on.
The teenagers we spoke to were also sensitive to the ways in which spaces like Facebook can be used to navigate the complex worlds of friendship and intimacy. Below, one interviewee describes how online and offline worlds inter-relate as social networking is used to soften inhibitions and to provide a starting point for more difficult interactions:
'I think you can make closer friends with people because by talking to them -maybe on Facebook, maybe on the chat thing - you might then have more confidence to talk to them in school or out- I think that can help where you do sort of get close to people - and then it is easier to talk to people.'
But the role of social networking in overcoming reticence or shyness in face-to-face communication sits alongside what teenagers do in friendship maintenance - those online activities that are frequently referred to as 'catching up'. Although some commentators have been rather dismissive about the banal or frivolous activity that this involves, we would argue that the playfully social plays a very important part in these new textual worlds. To keep in touch:
'...with your really close friends - like with us - we just leave sort of stupid comments - like if we haven't seen each other in a couple of days because now we are at a different school - it's just we will be like 'love you'...'
