ClappingTree’s Web 2.0

A reflection by Elliot Masie in the latest LearningTrends newsletter:

Dear Learning & Training Colleague,

You have watched me, as reader of Learning TRENDS, experiment my way through the design of a very different event, Learning 2005, over the past 12 months. (Me: “It has been truly interesting to watch.”)

In just 3 days, I’ll have the incredible honor of welcoming 1,500 learning colleagues from two dozen countries around the world to the start of a very different type of “conference”. We changed a lot of assumptions during the design process and I wanted to share those with you, as a personal reflection:

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CONFERENCE-BASED WIKIS seem to be the “in” thing nowadays. Did a simple Google search on “conference wiki” and straightaway I get 35,600 English pages for “conference wiki”. :-p

Yes, perhaps not all will be the kind of conference wikis that I’m thinking of. But a quick sampling yields the names of many conferences:

• X-Tech 2005 – May
• Canadian Library Association (CLA) Calgary 2005 – June
• ALA Chicago 2005 – ALA Chicago Wiki – June
• “What The Hack 2005″ conference – July
• OpenEducation2005 – OpenContentWIki – September
• Web 2.0 Conference – October
• WikiSym 2005 – October

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Aha! “The Birth of Google”, reported Wired in August 2005, “began with an argument.”

Apparently when Google founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, first knew each other in their undergrad days in Stanford, they clashed incessantly, debating over many things. Jokingly, Page said he thought Brin was arrogant. Brin retorted that Page was obnoxious, “We had a kind of bantering thing going.” In the reporter’s words, “they were clearly drawn together – two swords sharpening one another.” Later however, it was their shared obsession with backlinks that started something big. Read the rest of this entry »

An extract from a recent paper, “Students’ Experiences of Critical Discourse”, by Liam Rourke and Heather Kanuka:

“Computer conferencing, first introduced in distance higher-education settings over 20-years ago, is increasingly presented as a forum for knowledge co-construction, informal argumentation, group problem solving, emancipatory dialogue, dialogue journaling, or relational communication (respectively, (Gunawardena, Lowe, & Anderson, 1997; Marttunen, 1998; Jonassen, 1996; Boyd, 1987; Fisher, 1996; Rovai, 2001).

“So far, many students and instructors have reported that conferencing enhances their learning or teaching, and that they enjoyed the experiences and look forward to participating in more conferences. However, two decades of research observation indicate that students rarely engage in the communicative processes that comprise critical discourse. More troubling, some reports suggest that in the rare cases when they do, they do not achieve the purported outcomes (Veerman, Andriessen, Kanselaar, 2000)….

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