Have you used Flickr? MySpace? YouTube? Wikipedia? Have you created a GooglePages site? Have you read or created a Blog?
If you have, then you are part of the latest buzz on the Web – the Read/Write Web. (Of course, the Web has always been Read/Write, it just wasn’t too easy to Write!)
Lots of new tools are making it easy to extend your Web experience beyond consuming information to publishing information.
All our kids are doing this – but they are doing it at home, not at school.
When will our education leaders catch on to the new web tools?
While the web becomes more accessible by the day, our schools are becoming less and less willing to embrace the new tools that have turned the web into a Read/Write medium for everybody.
Information and Communication Technologies have come a long way in the last 15 years.
And the biggest transformation has been the delivery of information via the big computer network that has become known as The Web.
I remember when I first started using the Internet…It was in 1995. The “web” had been discussed on the TV and in the press since about 1994, after the Mozaic browser became available in 1993.
I “discovered” the Internet because I needed an e-mail address for my work. After signing up with Ozemail ( a local ISP) I started using Netscape 1.0 to browse the (relatively) few sites that were available then.
And no Google! My favourite search engine at the time was InfoSeek. (Wow did they miss a big chance!)
Once I had spent a short time browsing sites published by other people, the very first thing that I wanted to know was how to publish my own web site.
In those days it wasn’t easy – I learned how to make my first site through reverse engineering other peoples’ sites in raw html!It was immediately obvious that the potential of web-publishing for education was huge.
But every education journal I read at the time focused on browsing. I participated in workshops about effective searching, experts taught me how to export bookmarks, and how to integrate what I had found on other people’s web sites into my documents. All about consuming other people’s content – there was no discussion about publishing your own content.
The web was considered by our education community to be Read Only – a place from which to retrieve “information”.
But the web has always been a Read/Write medium – if only you knew how to do the writing bit.
And still – more than 15 years down the track – many senior education administrators still consider the web to be a Read Only medium. Their understanding of the Internet relates to browsing and retrieving, not creating and publishing.
Web publishing has never been real easy for those who didn’t have the geek tag! HTML code was never going to be a hit with Mr/Ms Average!
Software such as Adobe PageMill, and later Dreamweaver, etc, brought us a WYSIWYG editing format, but you still needed to know how to host (publish) your information so others could read it.
It has taken a while, but now the Read/Write Web really is more accessible than ever for anyone with a story to tell. Weblogs (blogs) have led the way, but other products such as MySpace, FaceBook, YouTube, GooglePages, Flickr and Del.icio.us are offering a wide range of options for the enthusiastic amateur publisher to share their thoughts and experiences with a global audience.
And those most adept at using these new publishing opportunities are our students.
This new-found information-sharing is permeating all aspects of our society. But what are local education systems doing to reflect this new collaborative environment?
Well, unfortunately, not much.
In fact, this whole Read/Write Web (RWW) thing seems to scare our education system managers.
Mobile phones and SMS are generally banned in schools, chat software is blocked by our school networks, access to blog sites in schools is restricted to the point of not being any use at all, access to any personal websites from within schools is blocked by default, any public publishing of information by students is explicitly blocked, and public sharing of information by teachers and administrators is actively discouraged!
But all the time schools are going full-steam-ahead training students to touch-type and to be experts in using MS Office!
How do we integrate the new Read/Write Web tools into our school curriculum?
How do we help educational administrators to understand these new tools and their huge potential?
How do we ensure that the curriculum is driven by the needs of school communities, rather than restricted by the knowledge of yesterday’s technicians?
How do we plan our curriculum so that it is relevant and meaningful for our ICT-savvy students?
How do we encourage our administrators to be leaders?
