Coming of Age: An introduction to the new worldwide web

By Steve Lee & Miles Berry

The benefits of e-Learning
e-Learning delivers many enhancements to the teaching and learning experience; the biggest impact occurs when the technology enables social and collaborative interaction where all parties actively build their understanding.

It’s hard to miss the fact that e-Learning provides learning resources in interesting electronic media and makes them available ‘anywhere, anytime’. Such media provides enhanced impact, improved accessibility, can be re-purposed for new uses and also help improve differentiation. However the required media production skills can be beyond teachers’ experience, and often publication is by commercial publishers, or a specialist media or web unit. This can have the effect of de-professionalising teachers, who lose control of the materials they use with their learners.

Even where teachers do remain in control of learning materials, a commonplace approach to e-Learning is to simply publish resources appropriate to the learning. Such content may be ‘interactive’ or describe activities to be performed but is otherwise passively consumed by the students. This can alienate learners, who feel reduced to the level of recipients of content rather than participants in learning. Other methods are used by many teachers to more fully engage students, for example Tim Rylands’ (http://timrylands.com/) use of the Myst computer games in literacy classes, resulting in impressive improvements in descriptive writing, especially from boys. Teachers in the creative arts often use collaboration and group work around technology to create works in media such as music technology, videos or animations.

Learning in the classroom
In ordinary, classroom teaching, we now enjoy a range of approaches that improve on the traditional ‘talk and chalk’ method used on its own. These embrace a social, interactive and constructionist approach to whole class teaching. As stated in the ‘About Learning’ (http://www.demos.co.uk/catalogue/aboutlearning/) report of the Demos-led Learning Working Group:
“experienced teachers draw on a mixture of common-sense knowledge, in which learning usually means acquiring factual knowledge that can be memorised and reproduced in written forms, and much more elaborate psychological accounts, which emphasise that learning is a search for meaning that is built upon pre-existing knowledge and is often realised in a social environment rather than something that simply takes place ‘in the head’ of the individual.”

Many students find that their learning is most effective when they actively construct knowledge during group social interaction and collaboration. Characteristics of such approaches also include: an awareness of multiple perspectives, provision of realistic contexts, a sense of ownership and voice, learning as a social experience, an acknowledgement of multiple modes of representation and a sense of self-awareness (metacognition, or learning about learning). These approaches are variously called social constructivism, social learning, collaborative learning or aggregated learning. The theories of social constructivist (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_constructivism) epistemology and Vygotsky’s ‘zone of proximal development’ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lev_Vygotsky) provide a rigorous underpinning for such pedagogies.

Evolution of the web
ICT technology centred around the intranet and web are also in a process of evolving from a ‘place’ into social and collaborative platform in which many are rapidly developing a voice and an awareness of multiple perspectives. Publishing information on the web no longer requires programming or web design skills: anyone can do it with the new sites that are emerging. Some are calling this “Web 2.0” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0) and it is having an enormous impact on how we get things done, and is much closer to Tim Berners-Lee’s (http://www.