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Weighing In
Can We Trust Students to Learn in Web 2.0?
6/4/2008
In the end, for us to trust our students in Web 2.0, we must first feel safe "out there" ourselves. But, I hear distrust messages from my colleagues. And, to be honest, not that many years ago, I feared typing in my credit card info to buy something on the Web. Even more recently, I was concerned about using new Web 2.0 sites. Wasn't it a waste of time? Would I become addicted? Who would I meet there?
With daily use, my trust has increased. I see more friends, family, and colleagues all the time on LinkedIn or Facebook. I have so many Web 2.0 accounts now I have to keep an "encrypted database" (scrawled so only I can read it) of all my logins and passwords.
But, still, for all of us academics, the question persists: Do we feel safe using Web 2.0 social sites? Do they seem non-academic or non-professional when we do?
To develop more awareness of Web 2.0, here's a great site to read: http://readwriteweb.com. Here, you will see what's happening in the "read-write" world (Web 2.0) regularly, get insight, and be directed to new sites to try.
Get familiar with these tools and develop trust. To make it easier to get to the ones you like, create a start page using Netvibes: http://www.netvibes.com. This is your personal portal to everything on the Web. Using Netvibes to launch to your Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, etc., sites, and connect to your e-mail, news, weather, feeds, and so on, you won't have to login to these separate sites each time.
Develop your own sense of safety on the Web. As you use sites out there, keep imagining how you can use the sites in your own teaching and learning. The water's always cold when you first get in, but, you know, it feels fine after you get used to it.
Trent Batson, Ph.D. has served as an English professor, director of academic computing, and has been an IT leader since the mid-1980s. He is currently Co-Lead for the Web2ePortfolio Initiatve (W2eP), a Senior Associate with the TLT Group, and Editor of Campus Technology's Web 2.0 e-newsletter. batsontr@mit.edu
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