I apologize for the long delay since my last post. We are spending a couple of months in Hawaii avoiding the cold of a Minnesota/Wisconsin winter. I am writing. I try to take on a major writing project while I am here. I also keep a travel blog when we are on the road. My project this year is an update of an online resource for educators called The Participatory Web and Meaningful Learning. I started this resource when online authoring became practical and have updated it as new developments have become available. It needed another revision. In addition to assuring the content is current, I thought it important to write a new section devoted to the now apparent downside of social media and other common Internet services. I have included the first section of this addition below.
Title: Can the potential of the participatory web be salvaged
I wrote the first draft of this site quite a few years ago. My wife and I had been publishing a textbook for future educators entitled “Integrating Technology for Meaningful Learning”. We continue to update this text. Some of the core ideas of our textbook were based on a book by David Jonassen entitled “Computers in the classroom: Mindtools for critical thinking”. Jonassen made the argument that instead of K12 educators focusing on helping students learn to use computers and computer applications, educators could apply popular computer applications (e.g., word processing, databases, spreadsheets) to tasks that would encourage thinking and learning. Our effort took this idea and embellished it a bit by expanding the theoretical background as an application of generative learning and project based learning and adding to the list of tools Jonassen had first identified.
To put our books in a historical context, these ideas were being promoted to future teachers at a time before schools had much Internet access. As the Internet became more ubiquitous, we began writing about potential classroom applications. Our first effort was a separate textbook (Integrating the Internet for Meaningful Learning, 1996). I see Amazon still has a few copies if you have a couple of bucks (yes, 2-3). We soon combined our efforts into a single book and the maturation of the Internet that encouraged this integration was popularly described as Web 2.0 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0).
The idea of Web 2.0 can be understood from some of the alternate labels applied at this time – Read/Write web, Participatory Web. The core idea was that the Internet had advanced beyond an opportunity to consume information, but the Internet was now an opportunity for those connected to generate content as well. The word “generate” is crucial. Here was a way for authentic production of content of varying types. By our way of using the adjective authentic, we argued for the value of communicating, discussing, and arguing with a real audience and not just producing artifacts for the teacher to evaluate.
This was kind of an update of what composition educators had imagined as writing to learn, but not limited to the production of text. We began writing about authoring to learn and teaching to learn.
These were heady times for the Internet and we definitely had the fever. The promise of everyone who was interested becoming involved seemed to have great promise for education, politics, and commerce. The Internet offered meaningful opportunities for participation that simply had not existed previously. The title of the resource we continue to offer with this emphasis remains described as “Meaningful learning and the participatory web” [https://www.learningaloud.com/participate/].
We wrote books that were sold, but the call of an open, participatory option was difficult to resist. I first wrote the “Participatory web” book as a wiki because I was writing about classroom use of wikis in our traditional textbook and wanted to experience taking on a substantial wiki project as a way to acquire credibility for what I knew about wikis. There are some challenging security issues in hosting your own wiki and I have moved and modified the content several times until it is now hosted as a WordPress application. Again, you learn from these challenges and what I have now is more secure and still easy for me to update resource when I have the time.
I am writing this lengthy introduction as a sort of apology. The participatory web has not developed as the force for good we had anticipated. Since I spent so much time in the decade of the development of the social potential of the web as an advocate, I must accept some responsibility. This section of my participatory web resource is newly written as an analysis of the present state of affairs and what we collectively might do about it. The content is based in my style of trying to make academic writing friendly and still trying to be true to the research I have consumed to inform my content. I provide references you can examine if you want to see where my ideas come from. In truth, I am now a retired academic so I no longer am an active researcher and what I offer is based on a review and integration of the literature. At this point, I can actively explore the tools of the online world (I still operate a server), but not study how students use these tools.
Internet Utopian
I am probably most accurately described as an Internet utopian. This is a descriptive phrase assigned to those of us who were heavily involved online and before we took some time to discover that not all applications of the social web were making a positive contribution to society.
When the Internet matured to the point that most folks who were online could not only consume, but also contribute to online discussions, I thought what was called Web 2.0 or the participatory web would engage folks in important issues because they would now have a voice. What occurred was unanticipated and to this point disappointing or at least this is where things seem according to many. Online activity is argued to be secluded in echo chambers and limited by filter bubbles. Rather than expand discussion, present online experiences are described as both more rancorous and narrow.
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Echo chamber – an environment in which a person encounters only beliefs or opinions that coincide with their own, so that their existing views are reinforced and alternative ideas are not considered.
Filter bubble – a situation in which an Internet user encounters only information and opinions that conform to and reinforce their own beliefs, caused by algorithms that personalize an individual’s online experience.
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The utopian view of the Internet seemed to end with the election of 2016. This for many was the first awareness of targeted advertising, third-party cookies, fake news, and the collection of personal information by online companies they trusted. When this actually started is not the point, this for many was the beginning of the end of naïveté and an openness to being concerned with how they and those around them were being made angry with and resentful of others because they all shared information and interacted on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram and searched with Google.
The present state of the Internet can be examined in many different ways and multiple books and research studies have addressed the interconnected issues. To make my offering manageable, I want to organize it using three themes. These three themes are not independent, but I will only briefly identify ways in which they interact to produce what we experience.
- What seems free isn’t
- What generates attention is not necessarily the truth
- You and I sometimes just want to believe what we want to believe
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