The Conceptual Age "A Rising Power to New Mediums of Web-Based Education" 

Throughout the history of American education, classrooms have been self contained entities. Innovations in technology are giving rise to powerful new models of collaboration. Perhaps in the not quite distant future theses classrooms will merge on a new venture. A venture while making profound changes in the way education is delivered to students.

Students in Junior High, High School and college are now finding means to communicate through the use of social networking tools, such as blogs, wikis and chat rooms. Although these types of collaborations may not be schools related they have become Americas youth pastime. While at the same time a majority of schools have yet to be exposed to future capabilities of these new technology tools. The reason being is that education has not recognized the full potentials of Web 2.0 and new graduates in the field of education may now recognize the capabilities forming a gap of understanding and the potentials for harnessing social networking. Secondly more advance schools will begin to encourage Web 2.0 online communities of knowledge gathering while the less advanced will take a back seat wait and see attitude.  

Due to deep changes in technology, education is entering a new age where students can participate in their own expansion of knowledge like never before. In fact the MySpace generation is the largest online community in the world, where over100 million young people hangout daily.

The questions that are developed for response are as follows:

1.       Do students ever discuss content with peers and how often do they discuss topics outside of the classroom?

2.       Is the classroom an exciting intellectual environment where topics are mirrored?

3.       How does the classroom allow for students to make additional connections so that the student can be further immersed in using and exploring information and understanding of concepts outside of the classroom environment?

4.       Is the content of schooling compartmentalized and separated from cross curriculum unit development and technology-based project learning strategies.?

All of the above questions illustrate other aspects of experience in which a student is immersed. Students need to grasp larger patterns. The part is always embedded in wholes, the fact is always embedded in multiple contexts, and a subject is always related to many other issues and content.

The primary focus for educators should be on expanding the quantity and quality of ways in which the learner is exposed to content and context.  Educators should design extended learning opportunities in ways that immerse students in content by using various existing technology tools that include wiki’s, blogs, and the development of technology-based interactive lessons. The premise of  expanding educational delivery in ways to include Web 2.0 opportunities is  constructed around the idea that the more children can experience what they are learning and the more teachers immerse students in the learning process the more engaged students will become in interacting, listening, viewing and valuing their education. 

• Using+Technology+to+Influence+Higher+Levels+of+Learning.pdf 
• Boomers Gen-Xers Understanding the New Students.pdf 
• Link to : Learning Spaces

Web 2.0 "Read and Write Web"

Web 2.0 is an expansion of the original applications of Web 1.0 which is most commonly referred to as read only web. Read only Web 1.0 allows users to explore the network for information seeking. Web 2.0 is a new set of tools that allows users to collaborate ideas through new mediums of expression. These mediums of Web 2.0 expressions technology allow non-web designers to create, remix, and mash together their own content online. Web 2.0 content creation tools occurs through the design of multi-user interfaces such as wiki’s, podcasting, vodcasting, and blogs. 

Web 2.0 What is It?

The video below "The Machine Uses Us" was created by Kansas State University cultural anthropologist Michael Wesch. Wesch and 200 student collaborators, that point to one of the most profound problems of today. The Net Generation has grown up digitally and they are living in the 21st century and according to Tapscott, that the current education system is lagging behind in the industrial age model by at least 100 years. Let's take a look at what the future might hold.  

The Machine Uses Us

Literacy 2.0

Today a new age is evolving, a newly formed conceptual age; an age and time when people collaborate to expand disciplines. A discipline is a developmental path for acquiring certain skills or competencies. In the past we have individually mastered our own proficiencies as we explored our world from one perspective, our own.  Now with collaboration technologies such as Literacy 2.0 individuals are enlightened by becoming aware of individual perspective by exposing ones own knowledge to the outside world.

The emergence of Literacy 2.0 will have an impact on the world by shifting the illusions of individual perceptions on how we as a society will learn and work together. Literacy 2.0 will give individuals the ability to expand the capacity to create new patterns of thinking that are nurtured in collaborative learning. What fundamentally distinguishes Literacy 2.0 from traditional Web 1.0 read only web is the potential to expand collaboratively on basic disciplines.

Social Networking in Plain English

Tags and 2.0

A tag is a non-hierarchical keyword or term assigned to a piece of information (such as an internet bookmark, digital image, or computer file). This kind of metadata helps describe an item and allows it to be found again by browsing or searching. Tags are chosen informally and personally by the item's creator or by its viewer, depending on the system. On a website in which many users tag many items, this collection of tags becomes a folksonomy. Tagging is associated with Web 2.0 and is an important feature of many Web 2.0 services.

How Tags will work in the Future

Tags are chosen informally and personally by the item's creator or by its viewer, depending on the system. Think of a tag as a simple category name. People can categorize their posts, photos and videos with any tag that makes sense. Tagging is made easy by the most part because the software applications give you suggested options for the website and also allows the user to describe their bookmarked selection. For example, you might tag a web page as being about web 2.0 and the history of links. Once you’ve bookmarked the website, anyone on your research team can find or you can share it with those who are a part of your social network community. For a more comprehensive view checkout the following sites;

• Social Bookmarking Tools (I) A General Review

Ted Talks SeaDragon

Affinity Spaces

Many have argued that these new participatory cultures represent ideal learning environments. We can call such informal learning cultures “affinity spaces,” asking why people learn more, participate more actively, engage more deeply with popular culture than they do with the contents of their textbooks. "Affinity spaces offer powerful opportunities for learning; Affinity spaces are distinct from formal educational systems in several ways. While formal education is often conservative, the informal learning within popular culture is often experimental." Gee (2004)

"While formal education is static, the informal learning within popular culture is innovative. The structures that sustain informal learning are more provisional, those supporting formal education are more institutional. Informal learning communities can evolve to respond to short-term needs and temporary interests, whereas the institutions supporting public education have remained little changed despite decades of school reform. Informal learning communities are ad hoc and localized; formal educational communities are bureaucratic and increasingly national in scope. We can move in and out of informal learning communities if they fail to meet our needs; we enjoy no such mobility in our relations to formal education." ^{1 _{JENKINS (2004)}}

A Video by Mike King on Web 2.0 

Co-Creating

Co-Creating may become one of the most powerful engines of change and innovations that the education world will experience. Co-Creating with other educators across the nation is like tapping a knowledge pool of similar interest, a reservoir of creativity that may emerge through an enthusiastic wealth of talent producing warehouses of digital curriculum. It will not be an easy change and many tough challenges lie ahead to offset the standardized models of the existing rigors of traditional education. There is nothing wrong with mass co-creating, yet some see it as moving away from traditional practices of “drill and be drilled” forms of learning.  

The problems are even more alarming when educators become facilitators of learning that moves distinctly away from mass customization; limiting flexibility and relying on elements of creative thought. After all it was the Wright brothers who decided to fly after mashing together ideas about bicycles and creating new ideas about propulsion and wing designs.  

True co-creating does entail deeper knowledge of existing technology. Technology that is currently not prevalent in American schools, at least from the digital natives’ point of view. These cries for change are now beginning to take hold as the business world is for the first time recognizing a new workplace; a workplace where individuals use the network to drive company decisions and collaborate daily in a new Web 2.0 environment. These new initiatives are beginning to emerge nationally recognizing that there is a digital divide between real world business practices and general education career preparations of the work force of tomorrow. The new workforces of the Lego workers are now being recognized for their co-creating ideas, workers that generate the remixing of multiple concepts on a large collaborative scale, creating new mashup products. 

Is it possible that the real world is moving everyday closer to global collaboration and the self contained classrooms of today are shifting in another direction? A direction of isolation, building the Great Wall of China and containing all knowledge, rigorous curriculum to specified outcomes, measured and assessed to a world where these measurements may no longer be important in determining success in the workforce. Has the term collaboration changed from working well with others to the mixing of ideas for the recreation of deeper meanings of the disciplines?  

In this new of world of digital natives who will monitor exactness? Who will control the truest forms of knowledge for others to repeat the same paths of learning? Who will be the valedictorians of their class as individuals climb the latter to earn their rights to prestigious degrees of higher learning? All of these questions will be pondered as the world becomes flat. In fact the gap between the development and use of technology is like crossing the grate digital divide of leaving all children behind. Are we now standing on the other side of the great digital divide looking for ways to bridge the gap? And is it to late to cross over? 

Co-Creating A Video by Mike King 

Back in 2000, Tom Friedman recounts, the world began to shrink and flatten, under the influence of digital interconnectivity. Elaborating on his World is Flat thesis, Friedman describes how this new global order puts creative, entrepreneurial individuals in the driver’s seat, and poses distinct new challenges and opportunities.

NOTES 1. Jenkins, Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century

The New Alexandrian Libraries