Abstract:

The student today is a person that has grown up and lives constantly within an ubiquitous digital environment using mobile phones, cameras, internet; this student blogs, plays games in immersive 3-D worlds, listens to podcasts, instant-messages friends, listens to music, authors and uploads his own video, produces artifacts generating culture for his virtual community. The student today absorbs information quickly in images, video as well as text from multiple sources simultaneously expecting instant responses and feedback, Prensky in 2004 described this situation as “twitch speed”; Duffy in 2008 emphasizes that nowadays “the students prefer random on-demand access to media; expect to be in constant communication with their friends and ease of access in the creation of their own new media and content”.

It is not sufficient anymore to use online learning and teaching technologies simply for the content delivery and assessment. To actively engage students in desirable pedagogical practices, educators should shift from the transitional basic learning and e-learning vehicles, like printed material, powerpoint, websites, animation towards an ubiquitous student-centric, student-content produced and student-content-consumed guided experience.

The Web 2.0 term coined by O’ Reilly in 2005 refers to a new web-based generation of interactions, applications and communities that define what is being described as the “Read Write Web”. Instead of content that was for the mostly static we are now seeing the ability to remix content in different ways in order to suit contextual needs. Web 2.0 technological application environment includes YouTube, podcasting, blogs, wikis, virtual worlds and social sharing communities. The phenomena of Web 2.0 provide for students an unprecedented way to access, socialize and co-create, necessary requirements to students’ mass participation culture that sustains a fountain of publicly available educational content leading to the concept of “collective educational intelligence”. However, simply collecting the contributions of the students does not necessarily lead to “usable and reusable collective intelligence”. Semantic web, an extension of the current one, provides a technology in which, as Tim Berners-Lee comments “information is given well-defined meaning” leading to the concept of “new value from collected data”. The “new value from collected data” is beyond summarizing or sorting data as it is strongly related to the semantic web’s potential rule technology to combine structured and unstructured data drawn from many cites across the internet and creating new knowledge that is not contained in any source before.

If we agree that there are changes occurring across the learning ecology and, that new conceptualizations are required to use these emerging technologies, then some care should be taken to think deeply about the impacts of Web 2.0 and semantic web on the processes and practices of pedagogy. The paper will
• Explore the definitional aspects of Web 2.0 and delve into a detailed focus on possible strategies for educators to incorporate the use of blogs, YouTube and wikis (as typical examples of Web 2.0) into the student learning experience.
• Investigate the way semantic web technology influences the “collective educational intelligence” by exploring how students’ chaotic contributions may recombined to create new reusable knowledge adaptable to the context requirements of a student.

Keywords:

web 2, 0, youtube, blog, wiki, sematic web.