Classroom 2.0

As part of the office 2.0 conference, I am/was attending the Classroom 2.0 session.

Speakers

• Steve Hargadon (Moderator), Editor, Classroom 2.0
• Kyle Brumbaugh, Technology Coordinator, San Mateo Union High School District
• Guillaume Cohen, Chief Executive Officer, Veodia
• Steve Dembo, Online Community Manager, Discovery Communications
• Adam Frey, Founder, Tangient
• Anastasia Goodstein, Editor, Ypulse
• Karen Greenwood Henke, Founder, Nimble Press
• Rushton Hurley, Founder, Next Vista for Learning
• Sylvia Martinez, President, Generation YES

The discussion was around the role of educators and the usage of 'web 2.0' tools by schools.

Some (interesting) comments by the panel:

• The role of teachers is to teach students how to find information, but most important, how to validate the information.
• There is more adoption of 'Web 2.0' technology and tools by individual educators, than the universities and schools. The IT organization are still resisting...
• 25% of education traffic on the Internet goes to wikipedia.
• The challenge is to keep students engage, or they will find "black market education" resources and learn from them. 'Free' resources with content which is not consider to be updated or the truth. (...truth and history are written by the winners...)
  
• Content creation helps students to improve their understanding of the domain they focus on.
• We need to stop blocking the students from using the learning tools or their choice, while learning in the schools.
  
• The teachers may feel intimidated by 'losing' their role as the single source of knowledge and authority.
• Classrooms are the places where students learn that they can do more than they thought can/want to do. Educators role is the coach and push students to excel.
  

As I see it, we had few discussions in parallel:
There are issues and ideas around content generation (quality, relevancy, tools, etc.), knowledge management (knowledge find-ability, clustering) and education administration (running schools and more).

There is a wide agreement that Web 2.0 'capabilities' do change the education domain.
Applying the relevant tools to the relevant tasks is necessary (dauh...).
The real challenge is to match the content development to the collaborative space while the school is not blocking it... and them to scale it beyond that school to include additional schools in the state/country and globally.

E.T.

Technorati Tags: Office 2.0, eLearning, Event, Web 2.0