Is Web 2.0 ‘Designed for Education?’ 3/5/2008, by Trent Batson
Designing anything in Web 2.0 requires new thinking.
Higher education for centuries has worked within a closed world where educators could design physical spaces and learning sequences (the curriculum) based on predictable circumstances. An educational designer could work within a much more restricted set of variables than what we see now.
We look at those myriad variables of spaces and sites in Web 2.0 and we find ourselves talking about “learning spaces” instead of “classrooms.” With that noun shift, we’ve let the genie out of the lamp. If primary academic learning can occur in places other than the classroom or lab, then educational designers are faced with too many confounding variables to apply the same traditional formulas and metrics.
