Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Initial thoughts on Web 2

Web 2 is an interesting space and offers all kinds of creativity - I can see why students would be excited about being taught through all this.

But a couple of thoughts occurred to me - how will students scaffold their learning going forward? How will they make sense of what is potentially quite unstructured?

Most pedagogical theory (currently) relies on the concept of structure in an argument, or that concepts have identifiable links that can be built on. So, not only is structure key to academic discourse, it is also key to teaching. The challenge Web 2.0 is how keep both creativity and structure moving together.

Must be time for another cuppa

2 comments:

  1. Jan, I think you have a very interesting point. Perhaps a topic for the next post?
    Adele

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  2. An excellent point, Jan! Should we, as teachers, leave our learners to find their own way throught the immense volume of information out there, or is the teacher's job changing? As Adele said in her blog, rather than being the "fount of all knowledge", maybe our role is now to provide some guidance - the "scaffolding" is now more necessary than ever before.

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