Ben Scoble

Contemporary technology

Contemporary technologies, in particular those connected to the Internet, have had a profound impact on the lives of people living in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Although this comes across as a trite or even clichéd statement, words cannot aptly reflect the radical nature to which these Internet technologies have changed and are continuing to change the societies that have embraced them. These technologies have been inculcated in many of the paradigm shifts that have happened to some of the most important areas of how we engage in our lives today. In 1999, Douglas Adams observed that ‘the Internet is so new we still don’t really understand what it is. We mistake it for a type of publishing or broadcasting, because that’s what we’re used to.’ Adams writes further that ‘the biggest problem is that we are still the first generation of users, and for all that we may have invented the net, we still don’t really get it’. Adams’ observations clearly illustrate that the Internet was and is such a new technology that defining what it was for and how it is to be used is both conceptually challenging and will require an on-going re-appraisal.

We often use the terms ‘Internet’ and ‘World Wide Web’ (WWW) interchangeably and without much distinction, but they are not the same and understanding this key difference explains how the Internet is influencing learning as a social practice. The Internet is essentially a global network of interconnected computers, whereas the WWW or Web is an application of services that run on and take advantage of its attributes. Therefore, the WWW is more than just access to a repository of content and a collection of resources that are linked together by hypertext, hyperlinks and web addresses (URLs). In 2007, Kevin Kelly explained that through such Internet technology, in just 5,000 days, an environment had been created which allowed global access to almost unlimited information and data (Kelly, 2007). What is even more remarkable is that through the development of these communications networks, the whole world now has access to a knowledge ‘machine’ that is always on, non-proprietary and has an enormous storage capacity. In addition to this, the environment is evolving to become more open, as its content can now be added to or modified by anyone that participates or engages with it.

In respect to education, Anderson (2008: 54) states that ‘the greatest affordance of the Web for education use is the profound and multifaceted increase in communication and interaction capability’. This is revolutionary for knowledge construction and learning as data, information and related services was either not free or was difficult to access due to various barriers to entry before the Internet became ubiquitous. As Anderson (2008) clearly identifies, users now have Internet-based services that allow them to easily connect with other users and undertake activities that facilitate and support the free exchange of ideas and new content. What is crucial to appreciate here is that the WWW is becoming a ‘social web’, epitomised as the free exchange of ideas through being facilitated by and conducted within an online, social and participatory environment.

In everyday terms, our experience of the Internet at the end of the first decade of the 21st century is very different from what was experienced at the end of the 20th century. Fundamentally, the Internet is no longer just a computer- based phenomenon and has extended its reach to include many mobile and other new devices that can also access web services on the Internet. What we have experienced and are continuing to experience is the Internet going through a paradigm shift, from being a passive publishing technology that is read-only (Web 1.0) to one which has read-write capabilities (Web 2.0) for users. As this chapter will hopefully explore further, the Internet can now offer attributes and features (affordances) that go beyond merely distributing content to learners. The WWW is now an active and participatory environment that has the possibility to fully support and enhance the learning process in ways only imagined or never considered before its inception.

What makes the Internet such a radical and disruptive technology for education?

Looking at the history of the Internet through the prism of education, the first important and radical event was the use of the Internet in its original form as Web 1.0, the read-only web. Much like old publication technologies, Web 1.0 largely presented information to users who passively read or listened to what was being displayed. In addition, Web 1.0 also allowed document files to be electronically distributed, allowing users to save their own copy. This was invaluable to education as it allowed information to be distributed widely to any number of users, cheaply and easily. Related to this period, it is also important to recognise the development and adoption of e-mail as the communication tool of choice, which was equally invaluable as it also allowed information to be distributed widely, cheaply and easily. E-mail can be seen as the first major Internet technology that facilitated learning activities that were collaborative and social in their dimension. E-mail was radical as it was a tool that supported offline relationships, allowing the easy movement of text and later documents between e-mail users. However, cultivating purely online virtual learning communities was still challenging using Web 1.0. Unless you had an online presence, such as a web page that publicised your e-mail address, it was often a lot easier to contact a website’s author (web master) than it was to contact a fellow anonymous user or casual browsers of the same website.

The crucial disruptive and radical moment in the development of the WWW was its transformation from read-only Web 1.0 to the read-write web, Web 2.0. This is a paradigm shift, as websites can now allow users to both contribute to them as well as consuming the information they contain. Essentially, users can now either passively browse websites anonymously or create an online profile to both access and contribute to them. Critically, Web 2.0 websites are now more than just a publication tool and can offer services that invite user input or are unique services in their own right. Many Web 2.0 services do not focus on producing any original content at all but rely on hosting usergenerated content. These new user generated sites are typified as social networking sites or media hosting services that only exist to allow users to post videos, share photos, write collaborative wikis or blogs and engage in online discussions. With regard to the individual users’ experience, this new Web 2.0 environment allows users to create their own virtual environments, buy and consume services and engage in totally new interactive participatory experiences online. It is important to note that defining Web 2.0 is an inexact science as it is ‘not a single coherent entity, but a wide variety of different technologies and these technologies offer different affordances’ (Armstrong and Franklin, 2008: 12).

Whether Web 2.0 will radically change education can only be validated in hindsight. By analysing the impacts and effects of Web 2.0 technology on society (e.g. commerce, entertainment, communications and politics) one cannot see any reason to doubt that something radical and disruptive will be happening to education. Armstrong and Franklin (2008: 5) outline that Web 2.0 will be increasingly important to education because:

Social learning is nothing new

In order to deconstruct and understand how the WWW, in particular Web 2.0 (Social Web), is influencing learning as a social practice, one must acknowledge that learning from social encounters is nothing new. Even before the Internet, people have always been exploiting social activities, professional individuals, friendship groups, peers networks and family connections in order to develop knowledge, further an understanding of the world and seek answers to some basic questions.

In formal education, social learning, as exemplified through the pedagogic perspective of ‘Social Constructivism’, is seen as learning through actively constructing new ideas by building and testing hypotheses individually or through collaborative activities and/or dialogue (JISC, 2009: 11). Beyond formal experiences, there is a strong history of self- motivated informal learning environments that demonstrate and reflect these principles of social learning. New online social networking tools and many Web 2.0 services can be seen as a modern reinterpretation and an evolution of traditional (offline) informal face to face environments, activities and relationships. The development and prolific use of web-based services and tools (such as social networking, search engines, blogs and wikis) exemplify that people are supplementing or even replacing traditional forms of knowledge construction with new augmented tools. However, as described earlier, users of this new social web can now engage in a process of knowledge construction online that increasingly involves anonymous individuals that are not known to the user.

Any historians reading this chapter will understand that we have seen this all before, as the new social web draws parallels to the development of other social spaces that have been popular throughout history. Examples of such social spaces are public houses, coffeehouses, tea rooms, union meetings, town hall meetings and public libraries. In some cases, these were originally created for one purpose, such as a commercial enterprise, but then quickly developed into an environment that had affordances that could support and facilitate discussion, conversation, discourse and innovation. Some social spaces were more radical than others, but many shared the characteristic of being an environment that facilitated learning and knowledge construction.

Standage (2003: 48) asks the question, ‘Where do you go when you want to know the latest business news, follow commodity prices, keep up with political gossip, find out what others think of a new book, or stay abreast of latest scientific and technological developments?’ In a modern context, the obvious answer is log on to the Internet and use a search engine, but in the 17th and 18th centuries it was through a visit to one of the many thousands of coffeehouses that were created. The popularity of coffeehouses stand out as the most radical of popular social spaces used for learning and knowledge construction. Coffeehouses had a number of key attributes that parallel the Internet and the modern phenomenon of social networking online. First, coffeehouses were sober commercial places and therefore allowed sober discourse and debate of the ideas and themes of the day. Second, the barrier to entry (cost of participation) was low and within the budget of most people. And lastly, the space itself was socially democratic, insofar as it flattened traditional hierarchical social structures and imposed its own new rules of social conduct and activity that broke from traditional norms.

Seventeenth-century coffeehouse enthusiast and fellow of the Royal Society John Houghton gives a telling account of the impact of coffeehouses in the following assessment:

Coffeehouses quickly became popular and were distinct environments with attributes and activities that lead them to being commonly referred to as ‘Penny Universities’. Critically, these social spaces were new informal learning environments that could challenge formal institutions. As Cowan (2005) makes clear, these ‘Penny Universities’ were emphatically not university institutions and the activities they encouraged were radically different from any university tutorial, both in their organisation and participation.

Much like the debate today of the value of the Internet and informal online learning environments over formal institutions, coffeehouses were not without their critics, both in support and attack. Royal Society scientist and diarist Robert Hooke was another enthusiast and saw them as serious places of work (Cowan, 2005: 105). However, many did not share Hooke’s zeal and a 1661 tract complained that:

As with many Web 2.0 services on the Internet today (social networking sites, blogs and wikis), many could not see the intellectual value in engaging in the current fashion. Commentators at the time complained that the new style of conversation in public coffeehouses was found to be ‘fluently romantick nonsense, unintelligible gibberish, florishing lyes and nonsense’ (Cowan, 2005: 93). Beyond a view that coffeehouses were just trivial, many were concerned that patronage of these coffeehouses could be dangerous, erroneous and that unintelligent conversations could undermine formal institutions. In 1663 the vice chancellor of Cambridge University mandated that coffeehouse keepers ‘suffer no scholars of this University, under the degree of Masters of Arts, to drinke coffee, chocolate, sherbett, or tea … except their tutors be with them’ (Cowan, 2005: 93).

Despite concerns about the coffeehouses’ threat to society and formal learning environments, they remained very popular for two centuries. Coffeehouses were a radical and innovative construction and resulted in either supporting or giving rise to the creation of now familiar and important institutions in British society. One example is seen through the development of the insurance company Lloyds of London. Lloyds of London demonstrates that coffeehouses evolved into specialist environments, reflecting the clientele that frequented them. In the case of Lloyds coffeehouse, the Lloyds insurance institution developed from people being attracted to Lloyds coffeehouse as it held auctions of ships, sold insurance and published a financial paper. Coffeehouses in the 17th and 18th century can be viewed in very similar ways to how the Internet is used today. Melton (2001: 226) describes them as functionally similar to the Internet as you could use them to ‘find jobs, conduct business, exchange information, or celebrate important events of their lives’. These coffeehouses reflected the spirit of the age (the Zeitgeist) and these new social spaces were ‘born in an age of revolution, restoration, and bitter party rivalries’ (Melton, 2001: 241). Equally, as the Internet re-adjusts the relationship between institutions and its citizens, the ‘coffeehouse provided public space at a time when political action and debate had begun to spill beyond the institutions that had traditionally contained them’ (Melton, 2001: 241).

The potential for technologies to become a new and dominant force in social communication and learning is exemplified by the way in which the coffeehouse network developed and radically altered people’s behaviour. Coffeehouses did not just operate in isolation and became interconnected and self referential. Newspapers, gazettes, pamphlets and information ‘feeds’ were produced from within the coffeehouse network and were about the activities going on within them. For example, early popular newspapers included the Post Boy, the Daily Courant and the Event Post (Inwood, 2004). One of the most famous publication names was set up in a response to the coffeehouse phenomenon, The Tatler in 1709 by Richard Steele. It could be argued that these types of publications were the RSS feed or blog aggregators of the 17th and 18th centuries. These publications were the output of thoughts and ideas from the leading thinkers of the day and helped shape public opinion, in the contemporary world we would conceptually know this as the Blogosphere.

This aggregation of information for publication is described in detail in the following Tatler entry (12/04/1709):

The development of news media was a radical change to the ordinary person, as cheap daily printed news had not been very common before. The result of all this new mass media was the development of the daily newspaper culture, giving rise to better informed individuals that could form an opinion about current affairs.

Analysing why coffeehouses were so radical to 17th and 18th century societies affords us a useful insight into how the Internet is affecting changes to our contemporary society. Essentially, one can see that the coffeehouse phenomenon was born out of a synergism that occurred between printing technology, mass literacy, mass media, popular culture and political change. The technology of the printing press evolved to make printed material cheaper, more accessible and lead to improved literacy rates in the 17th and 18th centuries (Wheale, 1999: 90–91). This happened at the same time as coffee and chocolate becoming a popular and affordable beverage, available at numerous coffeehouses. The subsequent evolution of the coffeehouse to ‘Penny Universities’ allowed the free exchange of ideas that had the potential to form new formal institutions, such as Lloyds. Through this timeline of development, the coffeehouse itself can be identified as an important ‘soft technology’ that influenced important economic and socio-political change. Zhouying (2005) describes these types of soft technologies as important elements in either innovation or industrial, societal and economic revolutions as they are ‘both the tool and the content of technological innovation’ (p. 139) that act ‘as the process technology for technology transfer, technology commercialization and industrialization’ (p. 139). What seems to be crucial is that ‘soft technology can be seen as a servant of the transfer, and even industrialization, of other technologies’ (p. 139). In simple terms, the act of people congregating together, enjoying a sober pleasure and engaging in the simple act of the free exchange of ideas and news brought forth some radical innovations. With this in mind it is apparent that the Internet can be seen in a similar light, as this new technology is facilitating communication, dialogue and information exchange that is altering the ways in which people are living their lives, socialising, conducting business and engaging in knowledge construction.

The Internet as the modern wireless ‘Penny University’

As Standage (2003) identified, coffee fuelled the information exchange of the 17th and 18th centuries and contemporary coffeehouses have continued this tradition through the phenomenon of the Cyber Cafe of the mid-1990s. However, unlike the coffeehouses of the 17th century, Cyber Cafes were quickly superseded by Internet connections at home and at work. Crucially, Cyber Cafes have moved from offering pay as you go, fixed line and site specific Internet connections to now offering a free wireless connection through hosting Wi-Fi hotspots. This is not a unique situation as many other popular high street restaurant chains have copied this service by also offering Wi-Fi hotspots to attract customers. Fundamentally, contemporary communications technology is increasingly ‘wireless’ as in addition to Wi-Fi hotspots, web-enabled devices, such as mobile phones, use the wireless mobile telephone network to connect to the Internet. Through the development and addition of wireless communications technologies to the fixed-line network, users now have access to the Internet anytime and anywhere. This situation is revolutionary in respect to the process of knowledge construction and social learning, as it has the potential of creating a generation or a group of people that is always online in any context. Ostensibly, through having your access to information un-restricted by any barrier, one can consider information and the Internet as a new utility. Much like the traditional utilities, the Internet is something that can be connected to and a valuable product drawn from it, an important utility for the knowledge society and the knowledge economy.

In the 2006 JISC report into the ‘Learner Experience of e-Learning’ (LEX), students’ use and attitudes towards contemporary technology in education were investigated. Their findings reflect this developing theme of information being considered as a utility. In addition, the report found that contemporary technology and the Internet played an increasingly important part in the knowledge construction process of students, both informally and formally. Fundamentally, many students considered that it was an essential part of their lives, exemplified in the following statements:

The LEX report supports Efimova’s (2004) examination of a contemporary student’s knowledge construction in the 21st century. Efimova highlights that contemporary students are becoming modern knowledge workers engaged in the activities of ‘finding, interpreting and connecting pieces of information, articulating ideas, engaging in conversations that lead to elaborating ideas and developing relations with others, keeping track of personal notes, conversations and contacts’ (p. 11) Efimova identifies that the activities that a knowledge worker undertakes can be mapped across the three dimensions of ‘Ideas’, ‘Individuals’, and ‘Communities & Networks’. These three dimensions relate to either formal relationships, such as through a university, or informal relationships, such as friendship or peer groups. It is apparent that with the development of the Internet, students as knowledge workers, can now support, extend or supplant their traditional offline information sources by accessing a wider network of information sources online (such as wikis, blogs, forums and search engines). An interesting characteristic of these online information sources is that they reflect ‘The Wisdom of the Crowds’, which represents the principle that the many are wiser than the few. Essentially, the user of the information has no relationship to the originators of the information and must therefore decide to trust the information being supplied. This trust judgement relies on new trust indices, such as brand name or previous experience of the service. Hulme (2009: 5) reports that 71 per cent of young people questioned stated that when looking for help and advice it is best to find as “many opinions as possible. As a decision framework, Hulme (2009: 24) outlines some decision criteria that young people, the so called ‘Digital Natives’ (Prensky, 2001), may use:

Dron and Anderson (2009) offer some valuable dimensions to understanding this online process of information gathering in their investigation of new ‘Collectives’, ‘Networks’ and ‘Groups’ mediated with social software. They postulate that the Internet environment allows students to blend their online information sources with traditional information sources from offline relationships.

Knowing stuff: what we now do with information

One of the most interesting emergent features of the Web 2.0 era is that all users are now potentially ‘Prosumers’, meaning that they have the role of both consumers, producers and co-producers in the Internet. What this dual role has allowed is a cultural shift on the consumption and production of data, content, information and knowledge in the 21st century. Essentially, web users can either passively consume (e.g. lurking or browsing), create something new for the WWW (e.g. blogs and wikis) or be active consumers by being creative and ‘remixing’ third party outputs into new forms. In addition to this, the separation of content from design is a useful attribute of Web 2.0 as it allows users to re-purpose materials into new contexts through easy to use web tools and simple HTML. For example, online video hosting services offer embedding capabilities that allows the re-purposing of videos from one location into multiple web pages and new contexts (personal blogs, collaborative wikis and learning network sites). Hulme (2009: 18) fundamentally sees this as revolutionary for contemporary students as ‘the availability and their use of the new tools gives [sic] this group a range and depth of conversation not available to previous generations’.

The findings of the Life Support Report (Hulme, 2009) demonstrate that the Internet is a potentially important technology that could support the higher order skills of critical thinking, analysis and synthesis of ideas. This type of cognitive technology joins the list of other technologies that have improved the learning process by removing some mundane or routine tasks, for example word processors, spreadsheets and presentation tools. Crucially for educators, Anderson (2008: 16) highlights that in order to promote higher-order thinking on the Web, ‘online learning must create challenging activities that enable learners to link new information to old; acquire meaningful knowledge; and use their metacognitive abilities; hence, it is the instructional strategy, not the technology, that influences the quality of learning’.

The cult of the amateur and the rise of the informal learner and expert

Many commentators have identified the ‘Prosumer’ as being a disruptive phenomenon, having both a positive and negative impact on our modern world and our ability to construct knowledge. Popular critic of this phenomenon, Andrew Keen, released a book in 2006 entitled The Cult of the Amateur: How Blogs, Wikis, Social Networking, and the Digital World are Assaulting our Economy, Culture and Values (Newsnight, 2007). Keen asserts that if we are all amateurs then there are no experts, leading to a world in which culture, economy and values are degraded. In regard to education, learning and knowledge construction, Keen makes an important point about the threats to our understanding of the world. Keen identifies that if the line between fact and fiction is blurred by uninformed and anonymous sources online, our ability to construct valid and reliable knowledge is undermined. This tension was recently exemplified through the ‘ClimateGate’ scandal that involved the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia and the United Nations International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (Hulme and Ravetz, 2009). This event demonstrated that the Internet is now a politically influencing force in which citizen commentators, amateur or ‘informal’ scholars are challenging formal and world leading institutions. Benny Peiser (McKie & Peiser, 2010) commentated that this situation occurred, in part, because ‘the emergence of a powerful counter-culture on the blogosphere is no longer reliant on mainstream media. It is driven by new technologies and fed by independent bloggers and researchers who increasingly publish their research and investigations on interactive and autonomous media platforms.’ This event highlights an increasing and popular trend opined within the Internet and society in general over the last few years, a trend centred on increasing institutional openness and transparency. Much of this comes as a result of the change in attitudes towards the ‘Freedom of Information’, whistle-blowing and the willingness to disclosure once restricted information on the Internet (e.g. WikiLeaks, ClimateGate e-mails and ‘MPs’ Expenses’). Trust in governments and public institutions has been challenged and they have reacted by making many of their data sources and formal documentation publicly available.

As a response to this new era of openness, the Internet is seen as an important influence in increasing links between ‘Professionals’ and ‘Amateurs’ (Pro-Am), allowing participants to learn from each other and advance their discipline. These ‘Pro-Am’ collaborations are obviously nothing new, but the ways in which the relationship is conducted and supported is radically new, and both parties can now take advantage of the following:

Lombardi (2007: 5) sees the new affordances of the Internet as being crucial in opening up learners to authentic environments that are encouraging formal and informal learning activities with online communities of practice:

Lombardi (2007: 2) sees these authentic learning experiences as very important as ‘learners are able to gain a deeper sense of a discipline as a special “culture” shaped by specific ways of seeing and interpreting the world’. It is this access to the formal and informal world of the ‘expert’ that makes authentic learning a valuable learning experience for a learner. Lombardi (2007: 2) describes this as the learner being exposed to the ‘subtle, interpersonal, and unwritten knowledge that members in a community of practice use (often unconsciously) on a daily basis’. This position within a community of practice fundamentally requires the learner to focus on being a subject specialist in addition to learning about the content of the subject. Formal and informal ‘Pro-Am’ collaborations are now a prolific feature of the Internet. Simple examples can be seen in the form of feedback and comments features on websites that allows a dialogue between a user and an institution or an expert. More complex examples are evident where formal projects invite users to sign up and take part in a formal project. Such projects can ask users to be a participant with their input adding to a growing pool of data. In other instances, the user may be asked to become an informal researcher that analyses data or running project related software that can be download from the project website, for example see The Perception Lab Project (http://monty.st-and.ac.uk/).

At the core of this new ‘Pro-Am’ phenomenon is the principle of open and free data. This principle has led to the development of open data organisations such as the ‘Open Knowledge Foundation’. Iconic figures such as Tim Berners- Lee and Tim O’Reilly have been advocates of the principles of open access to data and many governments have responded through the development of websites such as http://data.gov.uk/ and http://data.gov.

In this era of easy access to highly valuable machine readable datasets, there have been some innovative, creative and useful examples of what people are doing with them. One example is seen after the Haiti earthquake of 2010. In a response to a lack of up-to-date maps for the region, a call for help went out across the Internet using social networking services, for example the following link was posted on Twitter http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/WikiProject_Haiti#GeoEye. The rescue services were then able to collaborate with the global users of the ‘OpenStreetMap’ community to produce a current map of the main earthquake areas. Using the ‘OpenStreetMap’ platform and the most recent digital aerial photographs, volunteers re-drew and added useful data to the map of areas like Port-au-Prince to help aid volunteers on the ground move about the city and locate refugee centres. This was all possible as rescue services were able to access these maps via their mobile devices, all the more important in an area with very poor communications infrastructure.

Pedagogy 2.0? Opportunities and threats of contemporary social learning

Anderson (2008: 100) envisages that the Internet has the potential to change educational systems as ‘technologies are a catalyst of change, resulting in the need for educators and institutions to adapt and/or transform’. This assertion is also reflected by George Siemens who, in 2003, made the following statement:

Taken together, Anderson and Siemen are making the case that education and the learning process (praxis) needs to be re-appraised in light of an environment that is increasingly participatory and involves a wider learning environment that includes the WWW. Crucially, this contemporary learning environment is augmented by new technology and now involves external communities populated by experts, amateurs and other various ‘grey’ sources of information, data and knowledge. On a basic level, one could see this as a challenge to traditional learning environments to include new external sources of information, data and knowledge. However, it is clear that this is not just a content issue and that it is increasingly appropriate to see that contemporary technologies offer a valid alternative to traditional approaches through which the learning is achieved. For example, it is now possible to completely by-pass traditionally formal education systems and instead access quality sources through informal networks and groups. Obviously, this approach is a niche exercise and requires self-direction, self-discovery, self-motivation, peer learning and communities of practice. However, this situation does question the role of formal institutions in knowledge construction and is a challenging situation for traditional pedagogies used in education institutions. What this situation allows us to appreciate is that contemporary learning now involves the ‘Social Web’ which is giving rise to a ‘learning ecology’ that is best represented and possibly best served by adopting the Constructivist and Situative approaches to pedagogy. It is uncertain whether these pedagogic perspectives become the dominant or most favoured approaches to adopt. However, Goodfellow (2008: 32) sees ‘Constructivist’ and ‘Situative’ as ‘ecological’ perspectives and the ‘ecological perspective leans towards more social and anthropological framings, such as those that inform thinking about learning in “situated”, “community”, and “networked” learning’. Developing this further, Franklin (2008: 97) sees contemporary technology as offering something new to pedagogy and that ‘the pedagogical foundation for using Web 2.0 in the classroom is related to both changes in students (content creators, digital media enthusiasts) and changes in learning theories conceptualized as a bottom-up, collaborative, participatory process, as in student-centred, constructivism and active learning theories, coincides with the fundamental principles of Web 2.0: community, creativity, participation, and reflexivity’. In addition, Mayes and de Freitas (2004: 10) state that approaches that are participatory, conversational and involve the wider community require that ‘effort is made to make the learning activity authentic to the social context in which the skills or knowledge are normally embedded’. This identifies that making education applied and less abstract may be an important trend to consider as well.

Information literacy

In respect to opportunities and threats to education, it is clear that in order to adopt approaches that include information technology we must see information literacy as a key skill for students and educators. Without information literacy as a key skill, many users will be at a disadvantage. Many of the issues currently attributed to the use of technology in education relate to users not being;

Participation in this new ‘social web’ occurs in an age of content ‘abundance’. Anderson (2008) states that ‘every abundance creates a new scarcity’ and within the context of education this can be seen as a reference to validity and reliability. Content, data and information is now freely available, therefore the skill to make sound academic judgements on abundant content are of paramount importance. In addition to this, Anderson (2008) sees that as facilitators of the learning process educators need now to operate and create learning experiences which have the following conditions in mind:

As an opportunity for education, Lombardi (2007: 3) sees that information literate students which are immersed in new approaches to learning, namely authentic learning activities, have the potential to cultivate the kinds of ‘portable skills’ that newcomers to any discipline have the most difficulty acquiring on their own:

In a recent Nature article, Xiong Zhenqin, an ecologist at Nanjing Agricultural University stated that ‘research without Google would be like life without electricity’ (Qiu, 2010: 1012), indicating that the inclusion of the Internet in education is without compromise. Without a concerted effort to tackle the challenges of information literacy and to appropriately frame learning and knowledge construction in partnership with the Internet, we run the risk of creating insurmountable challenges for the future. At worst we are in danger of creating and fostering cultural cul-de-sacs that ultimately damage knowledge construction and education. Researchers have argued that the Internet encourages the homophily in social learning networks and that by ‘interacting only with others who are like ourselves, anything that we experience as a result of our position gets reinforced’ (McPherson et al., 2001: 415). This is a troubling issue as ‘if there is education there is also miseducation. Educators like to distinguish between propaganda and education, seeing the one as closed, manipulative and oppressive, and the other as open, democratic and emancipatory’ (Foley, 2004: 5). What is most concerning here is the difficulty of distinguishing between valid, accurate and factual information on the Internet with mis-information, errors and the distortion of truth. As seen with other forms of media, the Internet does contain propaganda and has the potential to distort and in some instances is distorting education. Why this is occurring is manifold. However, Tim Berners-Lee has highlighted that the issue of validity and reliability is of key concern, stating that ‘on the web, the thinking of cults can spread very rapidly and suddenly a cult which was 12 people who had some deep personal issues suddenly find a formula which is very believable’ (Swaine, 2008). The blogosphere has the potential to therefore circumvent unbiased and multi-sourced mainstream information sources and therefore could be a key tool for propagandists. Foley (2004: 6) identifies that once established, sources of misinformation could be difficult to counteract as ‘propaganda works on simplification: it appeals to fear, hatred, anger and envy’. As former British Prime Minister James Callaghan said, ‘A lie can make its way around the world before the truth has the chance to put its boots on’ (Newsnight, 2007). However, in the case of the WWW, the lie can now persist through repetition and many experts have personal experience of coming across the phenomenon of ‘Zombie Facts’, as no matter how many times you shoot down the lie they always have a habit of coming back to life on the Internet.

Conclusions

As with the social and cultural shift that happened with the period of the coffeehouse, the Internet has brought about a paradigm shift to the way our society operates, thinks and organises itself. The recent development of the ‘Social Web’ is the current disruptive phase of the WWW phenomenon and is likely to see learning as a social practice having a greater influence on everyday communications networks, information gathering and knowledge construction. In this new phase, finding and accessing information is no longer a problem but trusting it and so constructing reliable and valid knowledge with it is of mandatory concern.

As a concluding thought or twist, the Internet may ultimately succumb to commercial or authoritarian forces that will try to impose control over it. Greater regulation and quality control may not be in the original spirit of the WWW, but if activities continue to have a negative impact on our everyday lives and the knowledge economy on which we all thrive, the more the likelihood that the Internet will be controlled. What this future control looks like is open to debate, but it is not impossible to think that ‘soft technologies’ like quality kite-marks, paywalls and copyright legislation will be enacted to control it. These may seem draconian but as with all ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ issues it is never wise to poison the well on which you draw your water.

References