The Domain

The Internet started out as a simple idea, but over the short span of thirty-five years it has grown to something without which, most businesses and people cannot live. Over time, too, the expectations that people have of the Internet have grown considerably. From just being able to handle simple text, to handling full-length movies that are coded in MPEG-2 with DTS sound. Someday, the Internet will be the place where a person is born, where they live, and where they die (virtually speaking that is). Within the span of ten years that could be a reality, not talk. (from Innovations)

Teachers experience significant difficulties in adapting to the new culture of the ‘Digital Revolution’ and its affect on pedagogy. My researcgh seeks to understand the nature of the factors which promote and hinder the adoption of Web 2.0 pedagogies by teachers in schools. This area has been the subject of investigation at a number of levels in recent years, using a variety of methods, generally under the umbrella heading of ‘the impact of ICT in Schools’. However, developments in the nature of internet-based technologies in recent years have led to changes in the kinds of technologies under investigation, raising questions about the extent and nature of their effect on teaching and learning.

This research problem emerges from the observation that the implementation of Digital Revolution in the classroom involves qualitative changes in teaching and learning, and that the factors involved in promoting and preventing the uptake of these new technologies is due the cultural change involved in adopting those technologies. The key characteristics of Web 2.0 as they affect schools have been identified by Alexander (2006) as:

Social networking: blogs, wikis, trackback, podcasting, videoblogs, and social networking tools like MySpace and FaceBook.

Microcontent: sourcing and inserting blocks of content from open sites into web pages to personalise and integrate information into new forms, and to provide for collaborative knowledge generation.

Folksonomy: characterised by the tagging practices associated with blog sites and other retrieval systems like Flickr, YouTube, PicasaWeb and Feedburner, where metadata is used on-hierarchically to generate concept systems as participants share and organise their tags in their own manner. Social bookmarking systems like del.icio.us exemplify the potential of folksonomy to generate new knowledge and understanding.

Alexander argues that these characteristic technologies provide new opportunities for creating and sharing information at a more immediate level; and that they lower the bar for entry into the internet culture. In fact, this barely scratches the surface. I’ll keep adding to this page, but for the moment, let Mark Treadwell’s diagram speak of the possibilities of the new world opened up by the internet.

So how do Digital Natives differ from Digital Immigrants?