The clear example of a secondary language teacher embracing
the affordances of recent developments online. The term Web 2.0 is often used as a
label for these developments, and although it is a term that means different things
to different people, for our purposes, we can think of it as ‘a shift from what were
primarily informational tools to what we might call relational tools – so that if Web
1.0 was the informational web, Web 2.0 is the social web.’.
Web 2.0 tools have proliferated in recent years, and as most allow for some degree
of content creation and communication, they are often ideal for language learning.
At the heart of Web 2.0 is the blog, short for web log. At its most basic, a blog is an
online journal that can be used by teachers to publish information about a course,
links to resources and other information directed to learners or other teachers.
Ease of use was identified as one of the most important factors behind ‘the significant
proliferation in the number of teaching blogs’ used by secondary school teachers
in a recent, and there is no doubt that the push button
publishing first promoted by Blogger (www.blogger.com) has encouraged many
teachers to embrace online publishing who otherwise would not have done so. Many
teachers also now encourage their learners to blog, publishing their written work and
projects online in ways that go beyond sharing their work with an audience beyond
the teacher, and which help prepare learners ‘for the digitally-driven post-industrial
world into which they’ll graduate – a world where our understanding of knowledge,
culture, truth and authority are in the process of being rewritten.’.
The other popular online publishing platform that has become well-used by
secondary school teachers and learners is the wiki. The term comes from the
Hawaiian for ‘quick’ and a wiki is a collaborative web space allowing for pages that
can be created and edited by multiple users easily without any knowledge of web
design. The wiki is similar to the blog in that it allows for quick and easy publishing,
but the more flexible structure of the wiki means that it is good for project work,
whilst the blog is better as an ongoing record of classwork as the latest work is
always displayed at the top of the page.
Another development of Web 2.0 is the podcast, which comes from the combination
of the words iPod and broadcast. Podcasts are audio or video files that are broadcast
via the internet and can be downloaded and listened to on a computer or mobile
device. Apart from software allowing the creation and sharing of podcasts, there
are many other Web 2.0 tools that make use of audio, and to many users podcasting
now refers to any creation and sharing of audio online.
No comments:
Post a Comment