What does Web 2.0 mean for the elearning industry? How can we make the best use of this technology in meeting individual and organisational learning and development needs? Chris Mayers explores how Web 2.0 technologies can enhance both the experience and management of learning.
The other day I took delivery of my new business cards, one of the great things about joining a new company at the start of the year, everything is nice and new. On the back is the phrase “I am always ready to learn, though I don’t always like being taught,” credited to Winston Churchill. This fits great with my personal learning style, I’m a hunter of information, like a lot of people I know I like to get out there and find what I need to know, not be told what I need to know.
I guess this is why I have never been a huge fan of Learning Management Systems (LMS), a necessary evil in our business, but a massive benefit to learning managers and coaches.
"The big problem with Web 1.0, is that it is read only, you find the information you need, read it and that’s it. The problem gets worse when the user has to wade through page after page of information looking for that one little nugget."It never ceases to amaze me that the Internet as we know it today has only been around for a handful of years. The World Wide Web, as we know it, only came into being in the early 1990s and then was only accessible by a rarefied few and at a speed that made it all but useless. Google, one of the great forward thinking organisations of the Web, didn’t arrive on the scene until the late 1990s, by 2006 however Google was dealing with 2.7 billion searches every month. By 2008 this had risen to 31 billion a month as more and more of us use the Web to hunt down information. It makes you wonder who we asked before we could ask Google?
The first stage maturity of the Internet, affectionately known as Web 1.0, can best be thought of as the 'read only Web'. When you searched for the information you were looking for, you could read it, and that was about it really. During my time with ebc I had the opportunity to work with one of the industry’s most respected thinkers in learning methodologies, Robin Hoyle, and he used to talk about lean-forward learning. In essence this is very straight-forward and easy to understand, if you are leaning forwards at your computer you are, invariably, very engaged in what you are doing and therefore learning.
The big problem with Web 1.0, is that it is read only, you find the information you need, read it and that’s it. The problem gets worse when the user has to wade through page after page of information looking for that one little nugget. All of a sudden our stance changes and we are leaning back in our seat, not forwards, and pretty soon you lose the will to go on and just give up and find another route to gaining the information you need.
The second stage of Web maturity, Web 2.0, provides a dramatic change, the word 'write' is added to the process making Web 2.0 the 'read/write Web'. Taking our simple information hunter scenario again, I can search for the information I am looking for, but now I have the opportunity to leave feedback. Did I think that the information I found was useful? How could I help to improve the information provided? Can I rate the information? If I didn’t find exactly what I was looking for, then can I ask an expert or a group of experts a question directly, sometimes even in real time, and get exactly what I need? In its simplest form this is what Web 2.0 is all about, the ability to not only interact with others but to contribute to the whole.
Wikipedia is a monument to this whole contribution culture, when the Encyclopaedia Britannica was published, the information contained within its pages was provided by the World’s leading experts in their various fields. Wikipedia however is open to pretty much anyone to make a contribution, add their own thoughts and comments, an encyclopaedia that grows at an alarming rate daily, is constantly being edited and has thousands of contributors.
I love Web statistics, did you know it is estimated that the amount of unique information published on the internet this year will be 4 Exabyte’s (4.0x10^19), that’s 4.0 times 10 to the power of 19, that’s more than in the last 5,000 years, so for an information hunter like me the Web is a veritable goldmine.
Web 2.0 based applications come in various formats, the most common being blogs which have provided us all with a platform on which to become published authors. Social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook provide ways for us to stay in touch, publish what we are up to, share information and communicate in general with friends, relatives and colleagues across different time zones, from anywhere at any time, even from our mobile phones.
Getting back to where I started, the next generation LMS are here already and I’m loving them. Web 2.0 enabled applications allow the learner to find the information they want, add it to their learning planner and, when they have finished, provide feedback, ratings and even recommend it to colleagues. The learner experience is changing, in my opinion, for the better.
A Web 2.0 based LMS should recommend learning information packages rather than just simply assigning them. This gives the learner the feeling that they have more freedom to choose what they learn and when. The recommendations should be based on how an information package is tagged and how that relates to your role within the organisation, what previous learning you have done and any recommendations from colleagues or coaches. By using the feedback and rating system the learner can read a review of a package of information before they access it, a simple star rating and a set of user reviews can make a huge difference.
From the administration side, how often do training managers get real feedback about how good an elearning course is? If the learners can leave feedback about the course and rate it, then you can see first-hand how well it is working and if it’s not, do something about it. Add to this the ability to communicate with other learners who are working on the same elearning course or information package and even the ability to ask a subject matter expert questions and we have a true Web 2.0 read/write learning environment that encourages the lean forward learning stance.
Chris Mayers, formally IT director at ebc, has recently joined Infinity as head of technology. For more information email Chris.Mayers@infinitylearning.co.uk or telephone 01280 815746. Infinity will be at stand 22 at the Learning Technologies Exhibition this week.
