Learning and Leading - February 2011

In a traditional classroom, students talk face to face primarily to their classmates, and everyone knows that the teacher sets the subject and tone of their communication. But with networked activities, the boundaries can begin to blur. Students’ work may reach very different audiences who can talk back to them. This is a relatively new phenomenon. With Web 1.0 activities, such as student-created webpages, it was harder for random viewers to talk back to students, and teachers could more easily filter negative comments because they had to be sent through a webmaster. Web 2.0, in contrast, is essentially about user-generated content, and the nature of the tools promotes direct communication back and forth between users.

Although the educators we spoke to worry mostly about other adults viewing and commenting on student work, the students themselves are primarily concerned about other young people. Teachers often described how their students self-censor or limit their participation if they feel the audience for their work might be “hostile.” This is particularly important for middle and high school students, partly because of their age, but also because the elementary school students we saw tend to use these tools to communicate only with their parents.

Most of the schools and educators
we visited limited access to certain
tools or sites, thereby dividing the au-
dience into subgroups: just the class,
the school and parents, or the broader
Internet. During a focus-group discus-
sion, middle school students confirmed
that there are distinctions between
what they talk about on MySpace ver-
sus what they talk about on their class
Moodle. In many cases, the students
seemed to prefer communicating in
their class environment to posting
to the open Web. One student com-
mented that in MySpace, “you just talk
about music you like,” but in the class
Moodle environment ,“you can talk
about what you want to be.” Another
student in this class said his MySpace
page was always getting hacked and
defaced, so he did not want to put any-
thing too personal up there.

In contrast, the blog debates described earlier were successful because students felt they had something to say to each other. In a wiki example, an AP World History teacher asks her students to work in teams to build a wiki covering key themes and topics to help them study for the AP exam. She assigns each student a different topic and has other students review each entry to ensure accuracy and completeness. Because this site will help them prepare for the AP exam, the students are motivated to participate.

Appropriate Behavior

This leads us to the third, and certainly most important, factor we learned about: The social practices around Web 2.0 are paramount to making these tools part of a rich learning community, and educators must consciously control access to that community. The teachers we interviewed were all working hard to create both an offline and an online community that was supportive and would encourage students to share ideas, take intellectual risks, and give and receive critical yet respectful feedback. Without this type of social community, few of the activities we saw would have been successful.