Embed Size (px)
Citation preview
Internet and Higher Education 10 (2007) 196–203
Using Web 2.0 for learning in the community
Robin Mason a,⁎, Frank Rennie b
a IET, The Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA, UKb Lews Castle College, Stornoway, Isle of Lewis, Scotland HS2 0XR, UK
Accepted 7 June 2007
Abstract
This paper describes the use of a range of Web 2.0 technologies to support the development of community for a newly formedLand Trust on the Isle of Lewis, in NW Scotland. The application of social networking tools in text, audio and video has severalpurposes: informal learning about the area to increase tourism, community interaction, ‘ownership’ of the Trust's website and pridein the local landscape. The paper provides background theory related to informal learning and Web 2.0 technologies and describesan innovative application of them to a sparsely populated rural community.© 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Community; Informal learning; Community Interaction; Web 2.0.
1. Introduction
The Galson Estate Trust in NW Scotland has recently acquired 56,000 acres of land under a community ownershipbuy-out and has as one of the key objectives in its business plan the ambition of promoting tourism based upon theunique cultural, environmental, and historical assets of the area. The project described in this paper involves aprogramme of development initiatives, based upon the widespread community adoption of new technologyapplications. Web 2.0 is at the core of the concept of bringing together the heritage assets of the community in order toincrease informal learning about the area and ultimately to increase tourism activity.
Two important points about this initiative need to be emphasized at the start. Although ambitious, the success of thisproject is low-risk as the innovation is based upon the customization and re-combination (often referred to as a mashup)of existing successful technologies in a powerful integrated network that has not been attempted for this purposeelsewhere. Secondly, the long-term sustainability of the project is based upon the motivation of local businesses andenthusiastic individuals, under the co-ordination of Galson Estate Trust, to provide ongoing content management anddevelopment with minimal further external expertise or funding.
The community acquiring ownership of the Galson Estate coincides with the popularization of a number of socialnetworking tools which are ideal for developing a sense of community, e.g. YouTube, podcasting, Flickr, and internetbroadcasting. In this project, the aim is to ‘mashup’ these applications for the purpose of presenting the geographical
⁎ Corresponding author.E-mail addresses: [email protected] (R. Mason), [email protected] (F. Rennie).
1096-7516/$ - see front matter © 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.doi:10.1016/j.iheduc.2007.06.003
197R. Mason, F. Rennie / Internet and Higher Education 10 (2007) 196–203
community to visitors and tourists. Finally, the project builds on the fact that broadband is now available throughout thearea.
There are three main aspects of the project:
1. The initial set-up, customization, and inter-linking of the new technology applications that provide theplatform (the network ecology) to enable the local community to interact with visitors and tourists both pastand future.
2. Training of members of the local community (tourism micro-businesses, local societies involved in heritage andmusic etc, school children, and local volunteer enthusiasts) to manipulate and input data relevant to their ownsubject areas. A number of ‘learning-by-doing’ workshops will also be run.
3. Embedding the management of the various internet applications in the community structures of Galson Estate Trustwho then become responsible and capable of adding to, maintaining, and interacting with the contents of the sites.
2. Theoretical background
2.1. Informal learning
The concept of informal learning involves all that is learned throughout life in the day-to-day processes at home,work and leisure. The acceptance of informal learning acknowledges that there is more to learning than the absorptionof ‘explicit’ knowledge codified in texts and delivered during formal courses. It also, crucially, consists of access to‘tacit’ or implicit knowledge. The difference between explicit knowledge and tacit knowledge has sometimes beencompared to the difference between the knowledge represented in an A to Z street map and the knowledge in the headof an experienced taxi driver (Ballantyne and Quinn, 2006). Cross (2007) makes a case for the fact that informallearning is not the opposite of formal learning, and other analysts agree that the boundaries between formal, non-formaland informal learning are blurred and can only be meaningfully drawn in relation to particular contexts. It is moreuseful to talk about dimensions of formality and to look at ways in which these aspects interrelate (Rennie and Mason,2004: 111).
E-learning and technology supported learning can be successful in formal learning, but can it also support thesharing of tacit knowledge? There is a growing interest in a number of emerging web-based services that might beharnessed to support this very purpose. For example:
A number of factors are associated with this shift but amongst them are web-based technologies that make italmost effortless for individuals to contribute to web based discussion; the spread of broadband services enablingthe sharing of multimedia files; and the growth in web-services that support social interaction and exchange inone form or another. Whether it's sharing bookmarks in del.icio.us ; photos in flickr.com ; videos in youtube.com ; opinions in blogger.com ; knowledge in wikipedia.org ; or friendship in myspace.com the web has becomemuch more social in nature and much (though not all) of this web based interaction is used for informal learningabout hobbies, passions, and obsessions. For many thousands of people the social web – or web 2.0 as it hasbeen labeled – is a place for networking, community building and sharing collective experience: leading some todescribe this new phenomenon of massively distributed collective intelligence as “the wisdom of crowds”.(Ballantyne and Quinn, 2006).
Other commentators question whether social networking has real learning value and point to the superficiality of thisinformal mode of learning. Learning from websites and online discussion groups is very different from the orientationof formal courses, where stress is laid on learning step by step, just in case one needs it later or for the exam. By contrastinformal learning is just-in-time and just the amount necessary to put to immediate use. Kapp argues that:
We can contemplate whether “real” learning happens with Web 2.0 technologies, we can be philosophical aboutthe value of informal learning versus formal learning, we can tout the virtues of “collective wisdom” but in theend…none of that matters.What matters is that kids are already using Web 2.0 technologies comfortably andeffectively. If we old folks (over 30) don't figure out how to effectively use these tools to help the youngergeneration learn what they need to be successful in our baby boomer-run companies, government agencies and
198 R. Mason, F. Rennie / Internet and Higher Education 10 (2007) 196–203
other large organizations then we learning and development folks will be irrelevant. Conducting traditionalclassroom lectures for these gamers is not going to cut it and neither is our multiple-choice question, e-learningmodule format.We better stop bad mouthing Web 2.0 or eLearning 2.0 and start using these technologies or bepassed up by the “digital natives” as Prensky calls them. (Kapp, 2006)
Similarly, Cross (2007) takes a positive stance towards integrating informal learning and Web 2.0, and describes anapproach in keeping with this Galson Estate Trust project:
Because the design of informal learning ecosystems is analogous to landscape design, I will call the environment ofinformal learning a learnscape.A landscape designer's goal is to conceptualize a harmonious, unified, pleasing garden thatmakes the most of the site at hand. A learnscaper strives to create a learning environment that increases the organization'slongevity and health, and the individual learner's happiness and well-being. Gardeners don't control plants; managersdon't control people. Gardeners and managers have influence but not absolute authority. They can't make a plant fit intothe landscape or a person fit into a team. A learnscape is a learning ecology. It's learning without borders. (Cross, 2007)
Cross also lists the kinds of informal learning outcomes which this project aims to achieve with the community, bothlocal and virtual:
• becoming proficient in finding and trying new applications on the web• getting the big picture of bottom-up informal learning• understanding the role of blogs, wikis, podcasts, tags in learning• relating the best web-solution to a given learning need• participating and learning in an online community.
To this list, the authors would add important additional learning outcomes for this particular project:
• knowledge of the local resources• pride in the local heritage.
2.2. Web 2.0
Wikipedia defines mashup as a website that combines content from more than one source into an integratedexperience. The content used in mashups is typically sourced from a third party via a public interface (Wikipedia,2007). This practice describes the scope of the Galson Estate Trust project very accurately and this homespuncombination of mainstream services is typical of both Web 2.0 and the Galson Estate Trust project in that they arecharacterized by user control over content. Websites are moving away from isolated information silos to sources oforganized content with far more developed linking of information within the site. Users are less passive receivers ofinformation and more active co-creators of content. An archetypal example of this change is the online version of theEncyclopedia Britannica, which typifies Web 1.0, compared with the user-generated (and equally authoritative)Wikipedia, which typifies Web 2.0 (Terdiman, 2005).
Another web phenomenon of relevance to this paper is the growth of social networking. The web has alwayssupported some forms of social interaction e.g. computer conferencing, email and listservs. What has changed withWeb 2.0 is the popularity of social networking sites which have three defining characteristics:
1. Profile. A profile includes an identifiable handle (either the person's name or nickname), information about thatperson (e.g. age, sex, location, interests, etc.). Most profiles also include a photograph and information about lastlogin. Profiles have unique URLs that can be visited directly and updated.
2. Traversable, publicly articulated social network. Participants have the ability to list other profiles as “friends” or“contacts” or some equivalent. This generates a social network graph which may be directed (“attention network”type of social network where friendship does not have to be confirmed) or undirected (where the other person mustaccept friendship). This articulated social network is displayed on an individual's profile for all other users to view.Each node contains a link to the profile of the other person so that individuals can traverse the network throughfriends of friends of friends.
199R. Mason, F. Rennie / Internet and Higher Education 10 (2007) 196–203
3. Semi-persistent public comments. Participants can leave comments (or testimonials, guestbook messages, etc.) onothers' profiles for everyone to see. These comments are semi-persistent in that they are not ephemeral but they maydisappear over some period of time or upon removal. These comments are typically reverse-chronological indisplay. Because of these comments, profiles are a combination of an individual's self-expression and what otherssay about that individual. (Boyd, 2006)
More recently the term ‘People Power’ on the web has been noted in relation to the success of blogging, userreviews, photo sharing (Anderson, 2006) and observers speak of a ‘gift culture’ on the web whereby users contribute asmuch as they take. Examples include YouTube, MySpace and Flickr. The primary focus in social networking isparticipation, not publishing which characterized Web 1.0 activity.
2.3. Strengths and limitations
Bloch (n.d.) links Web 2.0, mashups and social networking as “all intertwined in the brave new Internet, theso-called second phase of the evolution of the online world.” But how new is the brave new Internet? And interms of this paper, what implications are there for a community project such as the Galson Estate Trust?
The benefits of user-generated content are fairly obvious:
1. Users have the tools to actively engage in the construction of their experience, rather than merely absorb contentpassively.
2. Content will be continually refreshed by the users rather than require expensive expert input.3. Many of the new tools support collaborative work, thereby allowing users to develop the skills of working in
teams.4. Shared community spaces and inter-group communications are a massive part of what excites young people and
therefore should contribute to users' persistence and motivation to learn.
It is easy to see the Web 2.0 environment as an extension or development of pre-existing tools andapproaches. For example, the interest in online community is a long-standing one; the notion of the active learnerhas a venerable history and the digitization of historical archives for preservation and access also predates theWeb 2.0 initiative. For those of us who have been working and teaching online from the beginning of the Web,user-generated content does not feel new, but rather a development, albeit an exciting and potentially valuableone.
However, critics of user-created content refer to a break-down in the traditional place of expertise, authorityand scholarly input. They express concerns about trust, reliability and believability in relation to the move awayfrom the printed word to the more ephemeral digital word (Poster, 1990).
Furthermore, if content is created by users on different systems, (e.g. podcasts, blogs, wikis, chat systems, and othersocial networking software) then it can be difficult to keep track of where everything is, and to access it with ease, bothfor the users and the casual visitor. This in turn calls for new tools to help users search and integrate across content thatmay be quite fragmented.
2.4. Attracting users' attention
User-generated content is successful only if users are regularly attracted to the website to contribute. Obviously itwill be important for the Galson Trust Estate project to have a website that does attract and hold users' attention. Unlikeinformation, attention is a scarce resource, and with the super-abundance of information now available online, it isattention which is the basic currency of the internet. The experience of information overload is more appropriatelyunderstood as an overload of attention-grabbing opportunities.
We live in an attention economy. At this point in history, capital, labor and information are all in plentifulsupply. Computer processing power increases by leaps and bounds, but the processing power of the humanbrain stays the same. Telecommunications bandwidth is not a problem; human bandwidth is. (Davenport,2001)
200 R. Mason, F. Rennie / Internet and Higher Education 10 (2007) 196–203
There is a need to understand the dynamics of the attention-grabbing effect of Web 2.0 and harness it for educationin general and the Galson Estate Trust project in particular. This need has led the authors of the present study to useGrounded Theory Methodology for data gathering and evaluation.
3. Methodology
The present study uses the constant comparative method, now known as Grounded Theory (Glaser, 1992), toformulate a theory about the attractiveness of Web 2.0 to users of the Galson Estate Trust website. This methodology isparticularly appropriate to the Galson Estate Trust project because of its subtlety:
An important feature of Grounded Theory is theoretical sensitivity, which refers to a personal quality of theresearcher and relates to understanding the meaning and subtlety of data. Theoretical sensitivity has been describedby Glaser (1978) as the process of developing the insight with which a researcher comes to the research situation.Such insight should be conceptual rather than concrete. It is often referred to as a creative aspect of GroundedTheory and involves the researcher working in the area to obtain experience and expertise. By gaining theoreticalsensitivity the researcher will be able to recognise important data and formulate conceptually dense theory.(Barker, Jones, & Britton, 2002)
This approach seems particularly appropriate for developing an understanding of how Web 2.0 can be used forinformal learning in a rural community.
The project focuses on three development areas:
1. Promoting informal learning throughout the Galson Trust Estate area by utilising a combination of new technologyapplications to allow visitors and the local community to interact flexibly with heritage resources.
2. Providing a platform for the co-ordination and display of text, audio, and visual information relating to the uniqueheritage of the area, and making these more accessible to a worldwide audience.
3. Creating a high-tech, low-cost, and low-maintenance ecology of proven Web 2.0 applications to enable communityparticipation in the creation of local heritage and tourism resources that benefit consumers (potential tourists) andpromote distinctive niche marketing for the area.
Using applications that are open source and/or operated on a Creative Commons license, an integrated network ofapplications will be built. This will provide users with a much more powerful learning ecology than simply the sum ofthe individual applications. The applications using text are:
• A weblog maintained by the local Countryside Ranger as a record of the events and weekly highlights of localenvironment and related activities, including news of local activities. This will be linked by GPS co-ordinates to aninteractive map interface, audio, and related images as listed below.
• Several Wikis in both English and Gaelic will be started that allow local experts and enthusiasts to jointly create andedit a collection of stories and anecdotes relating to the 22 villages in the north and west of Lewis, as well as on theculture and significant features of the landscape/ seascape.
• A sub-project with the local secondary school will be initiated in which the pupils are trained to research and createcontent on items of significant local interest, and to edit these into the online encyclopedia Wikipedia to create alocus of interest there.
• The project extends the functionality of a previous Gaelic Arts Agency initiative to provide GPS-based visitorinformation in multiple formats, including portable devices at notable tourist sites in the area.
The applications using audio are:
• Podcasts on local topics, including storytelling, visitor guides, and local music and poetry, all of these linked torelevant images and text on the website. The podcasts will cover contemporary material as well as the digitization ofsound and visual archives linked with the Local History Societies.
• Radio Galson is an initiative to establish the procedure to record and edit a number of larger podcasts as small audiopresentations on the north Lewis area. These are ‘mini-documentary’ items of relevance to the culture and heritage
201R. Mason, F. Rennie / Internet and Higher Education 10 (2007) 196–203
of the area that are on enduring topics. They will be accessible online worldwide in order to promote the distinctivetourism assets of the Galson Trust Estate area.
The applications using images are:
• GoogleMap will be used to customize overlays to serve as links for a number of different functions, including acommunity portal for local tourism businesses, arts & music contacts, and an archive bank of local stories/folklore(linked to wikis and Flickr images) significant to the enhancement of cultural tourism locally. The maps identify thegeographical spread of resources linked to the culture and heritage of the area and include links to other kinds ofresources.
• Flickr website will be used to establish a number of still-image slide-shows made by local photographers. These willbe linked to other applications to illustrate text and audio pieces on the website e.g. to wikis, blogs, podcasts.
• YouTube will be used for a selected number of short video pieces to highlight mini-documentaries of key culturaland environmental events in the region, e.g. community arts festivals and celebrations, traditional activities, musicalperformances etc. that have a distinctive local identity.
• Webcams will be used to establish and run a live-feed from three sites: the Butt of Lewis cliffs seabird colony; LochStiapavat wildlife reserve (waders and migrant birds), and Galson Atlantic coastline. These webcam feeds will belinked to the Galson Trust Estate website and other of the above applications.
4. Evaluation
This project encompasses three inter-dependent components: informal learning, technology and heritage. Togetherthey have both an outward facing aspect (increasing awareness of the Galson Estate Trust ‘brand’) and an inward facingaspect (increasing community engagement). The following questions, therefore, drive the evaluation of the project:
1. Do the interventions of the project increase informal learning, ownership and pride in the area by the localcommunity?
2. Has the Galson Estate Trust community been positively affected by the project interventions? For example in theirtake-up and familiarity with technology, and in their social networking habits.
3. Has the integration of the heritage data increased access and use by a wider population?
The methods that will be used to answer these questions consist of a mixture of quantitative and qualitative datagathering approaches. On the quantitative side, computer generated user statistics will be collected showing the numberof hits on the website. From these, conclusions can be drawn as to which components of the site are of most interest.The number of blogs, podcasts and broadcasts produced will be noted as evidence of community engagement with theproject. The value of the training workshops will be assessed using survey questionnaires with all participants. On thequalitative side, a range of interviews and focus groups will be conducted in order to gauge interest and significance ofthe various components of the project. At the beginning of the project, a focus group will be held with leadingstakeholders of the Galson Trust in order to establish a baseline. Two more such group interviews will be conducted inthe middle and end of the project, with a wider group of people, to establish whether any change has taken place. Thefollowing questions will be put to the groups:
• What technologies have you used and why?• What impact have they had on your interactions with other members of the community?• How has your knowledge and understanding of the area changed?
Twenty individual interviews will be conducted both with key stakeholders and with ordinary members of thecommunity: for example, the Galson Estate Trust ranger, owners of local Bed and Breakfast accommodation, the Headof the secondary school, members of the local Historical Society, local businesses, local residents and tourists in thearea. Email exchanges with users of the website from other countries will be undertaken to gauge interest and attractionto the content of the website. Questions such as, ‘what elements on the website attracted you?’, ‘how often have youvisited the site?’ and ‘are you planning to visit the area?’ will be asked. The iterative approach of Grounded Theory to
202 R. Mason, F. Rennie / Internet and Higher Education 10 (2007) 196–203
data gathering will allow us to continually revise and extend our interview questions as the evaluation proceeds. All ofthis data will be read and re-read so that theory derived from it arises directly from the material gathered from the users.
5. Contribution
This project provides the focus to bring together an enormously rich set of resources relating to the cultural heritage,social history, environmental attributes, and the commercial interests of a unique geographical area. The umbrella ofGalson Estate Trust as a coordinating body for the area, and the overwhelming local and regional enthusiasm for theaims of the Trust, provide an unparalleled opportunity to bring together these diverse resources and enthusiasms into aunified resource for the area. We anticipate that the project will demonstrate:
• That individually uncomplicated applications of new technology can be integrated into a powerful unified platformutilizing the culture and heritage of a community to bring benefits to both visitors and locals.
• That the construction of this complex platform of new technologies can be presented in a simple, yet exciting way tothe local community such that with a minimum of training, individuals could make it ‘their own’.
6. Conclusions
There are two innovations in this project:
1) To link together in an integrated manner a combination of proven applications of new technology to create anecology that is interactive and greater than the sum of the individual parts. We are not aware of any othergeographical locality where the full combination of applications that we propose has been successfully combinedto promote informal learning by a rural community and its visitors.
2) To improve the long-term sustainability of the initiative we will harness the support and enthusiasms of the localcommunity to create the content and manage the applications. By providing training for key local groups (historians,tourism operatives, school pupils etc.) in the use of free or low-cost software applications (mainly open source orfreeware) there is an impetus for the project to continue even after current funding comes to an end.
The aim of this proposal is to create a complex and impressive presence on Web 2.0 that is flexible, simple tomaintain, and interactive for the users, by a ‘mashup’ of a wide array of individually proven technologies in aninnovative, inter-linking, and collaborative manner. Informal learning by the community, both local and virtual, is theindirect aim of the project.
6.1. Continuing developments
The project has only just begun and the evaluation has been planned and the first stages executed. While initialactivities have concentrated on identifying appropriate software, the critical process of developing communityparticipation is more challenging and slow to develop. Nevertheless the early engagement has been encouraging, givenhow steep the learning curve is for a community largely new to Web 2.0 concepts and terminology. For example, thecountryside ranger's blog is well established; an online community diary and calendar have been implemented; twowikis (Gaelic and English) have been set up to present stories and information about each of the villages; music, shortinterviews and photographs have been contributed by local residents. In the planning stages are multi-lingual audiowelcome messages, poems (text plus audio plus images) from each of the villages, and specialist podcasts on localhistory. In addition, a mashup of Google maps, Flickr photos, sound files and text based on local place names, is beingprepared for the whole area.
The authors anticipate that as a future development, the Galson Estate Trust will be in an excellent position toprovide consultancy and hands-on expertise to the growing network of community land trusts and similar bodies abouthow to create user-generated content and increase tourism as well as informal learning. In this way, they can replicatetheir own versions of the project ecology with greatly reduced costs and labour input. This is an attempt to utiliseproven technology applications for community benefit by re-conceptualizing how the Internet is used and perceivedand by integrating functionality to enhance the areas of informal learning and heritage.
203R. Mason, F. Rennie / Internet and Higher Education 10 (2007) 196–203
References
Anderson, C. (2006). People Power, Wired Magazine, 14.07. Accessed 01/12/06 http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.07/people.htmlBallantyne, N., & Quinn, K. (2006). Informal learning and the social web. Accessed 30/01/07 http://informallearning.pbwiki.com/Barker, T., Jones, S., & Britton, C. (2002). The use of a co-operative student model of learner characteristics to configure a multimedia application.
User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction, Vol. 12, no 2–3. Accessed 05/02/07 http://www.springerlink.com/content/v7lvx3tu621rav0d/Bloch, M. (n.d.) Web 2.0, mashups and social networking — what is it all about? Accessed 23/01/07 http://www.tamingthebeast.net/articles6/
web2-mashups-social-network.htmBoyd, D. (2006). Social Network Sites: My definition.Accessed 23/01/07 http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2006/11/10/social_network_1.htmlCross, J. (2007). Designing a web-based learning ecology. Accessed 30/01/07 http://informl.com/?p=697#more-697Davenport, T. (2001). eLearning and the attention economy: Here, there, and everywhere. LineZine. Summer, Accessed 05/02/07 http://www.linezine.
com/5.2/articles/tdeatae.htmGlaser, B. (1978). Theoretical Sensitivity. Mill Valley, CA: Sociology Press.Glaser, B. (1992). Basics of grounded theory analysis. Mill Valley, CA: Sociology Press.Kapp, K. (2006). Gadgets, games and gizmos: Informal learning at Nick.com. Accessed 30/01/07 http://karlkapp.blogspot.com/Poster, M. (1990). The mode of information. Poststructuralism and social context. Cambridge: Polity Press.Rennie, F., & Mason, R. (2004). The Connecticon: learning for the connected generation. Greenwich, Connecticut: Information Age Publishing.Terdiman, D. (2005). Study: Wikipedia as accurate as Britannica, CNET News. Accessed 30/01/07 http://news.com.com/2100-1038_3-5997332.htmlWikipedia (2007). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mashup_(web_application_hybrid) accessed 23/01/07.
