As Web 2.0 became common in everyday life, online collaboration had started being used in many different places.
Kristin Alloway's article talks about how it's becoming more common to use online collaboration in the field of education. From using "online classroom" that has video calls and chats to publishing blogs or articles of their own, student have utilized many Web 2.0 technologies in their education. There are many benefits in using such tools of online collaboration, including distance learning, give students motivation and giving reluctant students opportunity to speak up in online conversations. However, there are always risks for young children using internet such as security issues, non-reliable articles, inappropriate contents and simply the destruction by many other things online. After reading the whole article, I was not sure if the benefit of putting children online is more than the risk associated with it.
Although I believe that online collaboration means so much for education today, I don't think it is appropriate to use online tools for what we could do off-line. Collaboration is everywhere in education, and online collaboration made it easier to collaborate with people who were not reachable before. I think it is questionable to conduct online collaboration if collaboration could happen in the real classroom without putting it online. One example in the article talked about how classroom conversation continues online as homework at night, but I think it is such a nonsense.
It is in a completely different field, but info Zine's article talked about the greatest example in this case. It talks about the use of online collaboration for open government and transparency. In this, online collaboration brought "new" collaboration that was not achievable before instead of putting existing collaboration online. I'd like to see more of these collaborations in the future.
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I agree. I think that using Web 2.0 in the classroom is sometimes totally unnecessary especially when assignments can be turned in in person the same way it is over the Internet. Especially for children in elementary and middle school. They don't understand the dangers of the Internet when they post things.
ReplyDeleteGreat post. We don't have to do activities what we can do by ourselves, without computers and the Internet. It can make students be distracted from the class.
ReplyDelete