LEARNING TO FACE THE ECONOMIC CRISIS WITH COLLABORATIVE WEB 2.0 TOOLS

Our educative innovative project through technologies is grounded in the contemporary socio-economic situation and tries to teach students of Fine Arts and Audio-visual Communication how it is possible to get a innovative cultural project off the ground thanks to Web 2.0 tools.
The economic crisis, which is installed in some European countries and the United States, has reduced drastically the funding aimed to the cultural field. In this way cultural production is shown monopolized by big private companies which are minimizing risks because of their fear to lose money. The consequence is a cultural panorama in which innovation is getting more and more difficult.
However, in the middle of such a distressing panorama, some cultural projects are arising as an alternative to the dominant model of cultural production. Their power is based on the fact that they do not depend either on public resources or on the law of supply and demand, but on the resources and interests shared by a crowd of individuals.
These cultural projects have appeared in the last years thanks to communication technologies and Web 2.0 development. In the last years, the improvements in social networks, open contents software and P2P networks have modified the traditional model of production. In Web 2.0, many innovative projects have found the chance for self-management by getting the material and the human resources (crowdsourcing) and funding (crowdfunding) from different users and institutions to achieve their aim. Hence this model of cultural production arises as one of the best alternatives to face the contemporary cultural panorama.

Our educative innovative project is grounded in this socio-economic situation. Our objective is to offer Fine Arts and Audiovisual Communication students the knowledge and tools that Web 2.0 can give them to develop their own projects. In order to achieve that, our e-learning methodology will be developed in the following way:

1. We will start by letting students know about those cultural projects that have been developed successfully in Web 2.0, so they will be able to analyze both their crowdsourcing and crowdfounding strategies and the online platforms and tools that have been used.
2. Students will experience the use of some of the collaborative tools that they have identified in those projects.
3. They will familiarize themselves with some online platforms –as Wikis– that allow them to make a collaborative space to create, develop and spread their own projects.
4. They will be asked to analyze the stages of development of an innovative collaborative project in Web 2.0 and to identify which tools are the most appropriated for each stage.
5. Students will be asked to create an innovative cultural project through an online platform by using crowdsourcing and crowdfounding strategies. In order to achieve this, they will have to use as many collaborative tools as necessary.
6. Finally, they will be taught to viralize their projects by using different web positioning strategies.

The assessment of this innovative project will be based on the use of two main tools: on the one hand students will fill in an objective-based achievement test; on the other hand teachers together with students will analyze the relevance and applicability of the proposed projects. Lastly, we would like to apply this educative proposal to other areas such as the business or scientific field.