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28 Management and Services gathering, beyond the physical ones like the workplace and the home - that goes beyond simply searching for and accessing information. The Internet is changing how we interact with each other, if it’s either for learning from each other, for working together or for new ways of recreation. What it does is actually gathering a wide range of intertwined advanced and emerging technologies into the so-called second phase of the evolution of the online world. This is also the reason why the term “Web 2.0” has become so popular for defining these new technologies of the Internet, representing – as shown above – only the suggestion of an upgraded network, of an Internet naturally developed into a new stage of existence and functionality. According to Tim O’Reilly (2005), the one who introduced this term, Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as a platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform. O'Reilly said that the “2.0” refers to the historical context of web businesses “coming back” after the 2001 collapse of the dot-com bubble, in addition to the distinguishing characteristics of the projects that survived the bust or thrived thereafter. The Internet era prior to that, the one pertaining to web developers and specialists only, is known as the Web 1.0 period, while Web 2.0 is what we call the democratized Internet or the Internet for everybody, since anyone in the world can easily go online and create their own contents there. What stays behind this empowerment of the masses, of this engagement in mass participation is the fact that all the Web 2.0 technologies under the loop here make it almost effortless for individuals to contribute to the web based discussion and provide an extremely convenient support for social interaction and exchange of one form or another. Since these tools have transformed the Internet into a place for networking, community building and sharing collective experience, some have been led to describe this new phenomenon of massively distributed collective intelligence as “the wisdom of crowds” (Ballantyne & Quinn, 2006), giving a first hint towards the bigger idea developed throughout this chapter of people sharing knowledge, learning together and exploring new ways of capturing and disseminating their intelligence, all processes enabled by innovative technologies of the Internet. To enter more concretely into the world of Web 2.0 tools and paint a fairly comprehensive picture of these technologies without making use of an excessively technical vocabulary, here are the most popular ones of these tools and what they capture in essence: - Weblogs or blogs are freeform digital canvases used to communicate in an open setting or well-defined group to capture topic-specific content in the form of articles (posts) listed in reversed chronological order; blogs can encompass all sorts of content, from visual, audio and video, as well as links to other blogs, information about the author and readers’ comments; the term blogosphere has been born with the explosion of blogs around the world - there are currently around 100.000 new blogs created daily (Pascu, 2008) - describing the online world of these public writing environments; - Wikis are web-based tools designed for collaborative, unstructured interactions among formal and informal groups, popular with project teams for coordinating work, team editing and capturing project updates; the most well-known example of a wiki is Wikipedia, a collaboratively-created online encyclopaedia with more than 75000 active contributors working on more than 10 million articles in 250 languages (http://wikipedia.org/). Learning 2.0: collaborative technologies reshaping learning pathways 29 - Tagging, social bookmarking and folksonomies represent basically assigning categories/names to Web and other content, such as articles, books (Amazon), pictures (Flickr), videos (YouTube), blogs (Technorati) and wiki entries, or institutional and team documents; - Social networking/online communities refer to Web-based sites or internal platforms that supports interaction among users of all kinds; - Social filtering means letting users rate content to create collective opinion of its relevance and value; - Mash-ups are the result of combining data from two applications (usually with open application programming interfaces) that weren’t originally intended to work together. - Virtual worlds are nothing else but virtual environments like Second Life or similar online 3D virtual worlds where users can socialize, connect and create using free voice and text chat. All of these tools and others have slowly made their way into most every aspect of human life. We use them to stay connected with each other, to work more efficiently, to extend our network of peers, to enhance marketing and management activities and basically to share everything – from personal to field-specific information, from comments and opinions to institutional knowledge. Further on we are going to see how they are used also in enabling learning processes - formal or informal - what are the premises for such innovations in the realm of education and what amazing opportunities they bring along from this very specific and interesting point of view. 3. From Web 2.0 to Learning 2.0 Having a fairly clear image about some of the most largely used Web 2.0 tools and how the Internet developed into incorporating such innovative technologies, we can now reach the nucleus of our endeavour and address their role in learning and educative processes. We are basically referring to emerging initiatives of integrating Web 2.0 applications in educational contexts, a phenomenon unsurprisingly labelled as Learning 2.0. As it was mentioned before, there have been a lot of discussions about the effect that web technologies are having on commerce, media and business in general but a much more little coverage on the impact they are having on education. Like the web itself, technology enabled learning processes have gone through profound transformations as well. It actually all started with e-learning, comprising all forms of electronically supported learning and teaching, content being delivered via the Internet, intranet/extranet, audio or video tape, satellite TV, and CD-ROM, enabling the transfer of skills and knowledge. The early promise of e-learning though - that of empowerment - has not been fully realized, as for many the experience of e-learning has been no more than a hand-out published online, coupled with a simple multiple-choice quiz, which is hardly inspiring, let alone empowering. This happened because the traditional approach to e-learning has been to employ the use of a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), software that is often cumbersome and expensive - and which tends to be structured around courses, timetables, and testing (Becta, 2007). 30 Management and Services This is an approach that is too often driven by the needs of the institution rather than the individual learner. Teachers sensed this major flaw of e-learning materials and have started to explore the potential of blogs, media-sharing services and other social software - which, although not designed specifically for e-learning, can be used to empower students and create exciting new learning opportunities. And these is how, by using this new web services, e-learning has tapped into its potential of becoming far more personal, sociable and flexible – in other words, of becoming Learning 2.0. One of the pioneers that intuitively recognized the beginning of this transition is Stephen Downes2, a senior researcher with the National Research Council of Canada based in Moncton, New Brunswick at the Institute for Information Technology's e-Learning Research Group, who firstly coined the phenomenon as e-learning 2.0 and described it as an approach that combines the use of discrete but complementary tools and web services such as blogs, wikis, and other social software to support the creation of ad-hoc learning communities. In order to better understand how this happens specifically, we are further on going to look into the use of each of the major Web 2.0 tools in part for educational purposes. We are going to start with blogs, as they are very easy and flexible tools for using, with various educational advantages, as shown by the increasing number of research studies in their educational usage. Blogs not only remove the technical barriers to writing and publishing online, but the „journal“ format encourages students to keep a record of their thinking over time. Blogs of course also facilitate critical feedback, by letting readers add comments, which could be from teachers, peers or a wider audience. So it is suggested that blogs enhance writing skills, facilitate reflection, encourage critical thinking with collaborative learning, and provide feedback and active learning (Ellison & Wu, 2008). Blogs are well suited to serve as online personal journals because they enable students sharing files and resources, giving them the possibility of writing for readers beyond their classmates (Bruns, 2008). In addition, blogs can be used as e-portfolios that keep records of personal development process, reflections and achievement (Alexander, 2007). The beauty of it is that a blog needn't be limited to a single author - it can mix different kinds of voices, including fellow students, teachers and mentors, or subject specialists (experts of the dicussed matter or even personalities of the world outside immediate education circles, such as authors of studied novels or creators of studied art pieces), becoming a very interactive medium for learning with all these different peers being able to bring their input on a specific curricular subject in a certain virtual space. As blogs, wikis have also attracted attention in educational field for their advantages and usability, and studies about using wikis in education have increased in number. Wikis are considered to be effective tools for learning and teaching as they facilitate collaborative learning, provide collaborative writing, support project based learning, promote creativity, encourage critical searching, support inquiry based and social constructivist learning (Konieczny, 2007). Some of other educational usage of wikis are also suggested as classroom websites, easy course administration and timetabling, easy online updating content, online dictionary, student feedback and self assessment, bibliographically organized class or group projects, virtual classes for online collaboration, creating frequently asked questions (FAQ) for classroom or students (Augar et all, 2004; Konieczny, 2007). 2 http://www.downes.ca/news/OLDaily.htm Learning 2.0: collaborative technologies reshaping learning pathways 31 Podcasting has aslo become a popular technology in education, in part because it provides a way of pushing educational content to learners. For example, Stanford University has teamed up with Apple to create the Stanford iTunes University3, which provides a range of digital content (some closed and some publicly accessible) that students can subscribe to using Apple's iTunes software. Especially as podcasting is being used with mobile devices, it can be viewed as another variant of mobile learning. Although podcasting is not a synchronous activity, it provides students information that will help them feel connected to the learning community. Moreover, as with blogging, podcasting provides students with a sense of audience - and they are highly motivated to podcast because the skills required seem relevant to today's world (Lee et all, 2008). Social networks can also be viewed as pedagogical tools that stem from their affordances of information discovery and sharing, attracting and supporting networks of people and facilitating connections between them, engaging users in informal learning and creative, expressive forms of behaviour and identity seeking. Even media sharing sites like Flickr or YouTube have found their use within education. Flickr provides a valuable resource for students and educators looking for images for use in presentations, learning materials or coursework, and the tagging of images makes it much easier to find relevant content. Just as well, YouTube can be used in several interactive assignments where the final result can be viewed/appreciated/commented on in video format online by classmates and the wider YouTube community. So far we have managed to get only a brief glance into the use of Web 2.0 tool for education and learning, the topic being enriched with new practical examples or best practices every day. At the same pace increase also the research efforts of studying the impact of each and every one of these new media in educational contexts, which is a gratifying thing, bringing us more and more evidence of Web 2.0 technologies clearly reshaping learning pathways at the moment. To quickly summarise all of the above, being slowly introduced also in the educational system, such applications: - facilitate access to information for everyone, making institutional processes more transparent and the distribution of educational material more efficient; - integrate learning into a wider community, reaching out to virtually meet people from other age-groups and socio-cultural backgrounds, linking to experts, researchers or practitioners in a certain field of study and thus opening up alternative channels for gaining knowledge and enhancing skills; - support the exchange of knowledge and material and facilitate community building and collaboration among learners and teachers; - increase academic achievement with the help of motivating, personalised and engaging learning tools and environments; - implement pedagogical strategies intended to support, facilitate, enhance and improve learning processes (Redecker et all, 2009). Thus, such emerging technologies and changing pedagogies bring out the necessity for more effective two way communication, promoting interaction and collaborative working, 3 http://itunes.stanford.edu/ 32 Management and Services sharing and flexible participation between all participants in the education and learning environment. We can honestly say now that we understand the Learning 2.0 phenomenon as one of utmost importance and actuality, announcing what might become a crucial impact on the future of educational pathways worldwide. Bearing this acknowledgement in mind, we will further embark on an attempt to better grasping the implications of Learning 2.0 developments, by underlining the core positive aspects they bring in, as well as the biggest challenges and bottlenecks. 4. Discussing Learning 2.0 4.1 Opportunities and advantages The most obvious advantage of using Web 2.0 tools within educational and training contexts of all kind would be their contribution in terms of fostering worldwide innovation and modernization of this field. As the already undertaken research suggests and as the figure below very clearly depicts, Learning 2.0 strategies would contribute in particular to three dimensions of innovation – technological, pedagogical and organizational innovation. The self-explanatory matrix in Figure 1 pictures the way in which Learning 2.0 strategies bring together several core aspects of our lives, providing the technological premises (new ways, tools and methods) for learning, then drawing the attention upon the basic need of organizational transformations (re-creating teaching and learning practice), so that in the end all the preconditions are there for pedagogical innovation and empowerment of the learner. Establishing this incremental pace, Learning 2.0 strategies first of all imply the existence and usability of collaborative technologies, that would increase the accessibility and availability of learning content and would of course provide new, more efficient frameworks for knowledge acquisition, dissemination and management. Building on our introductory arguments, Web 2.0 tools allow embedding learning activities in more engaging multimedia environments, with a high degree of quality and interoperability, where dynamic or individualised learning resources are easily created. Moreover, the simple fact that Learning 2.0 helps overcoming the limitations of face-to-face instruction through versatile tools for knowledge exchange and collaboration is a great achievement per se and something that could be made the most of in remote areas where there is an unbalanced ratio between the number of learners and available teachers. Moving forward to the next innovation dimension, namely the organizational innovation, Learning 2.0 both requires and promotes this type of transformations and it can contribute to making educational organisations more dynamic, flexible and open. Through collaborative technologies institutions in this sector can become reflective organisations that critically evaluate and revise their corporate strategies in order to support innovative pedagogies. But in order for this to happen first of all the necessary infrastructure in which social media tools are accessible to all learners and teachers needs to be provided. In addition to this, educational institutions need to make efforts towards creating an atmosphere of support for Learning 2.0, in which new teaching and learning models are fostered and new assessment and grading strategies are integrated. Learning 2.0: collaborative technologies reshaping learning pathways 33 Fig. 1. Te innovative potential of Learning 2.04 Once all these developments are mobilized, the primary sine-qua-non conditions are set for learning approaches using social media to promote pedagogical innovation, which basically presumes encouraging teaching and learning processes that are based on personalisation and collaboration. The main consequence of pedagogical innovation lays in a redefining shift within interaction patterns between and among students and teachers. This way teachers become much more than just instructors or lecturers – they embrace their roles as coordinators, moderators, mediators and mentors. At the same time students’ roles evolve as well, from taking responsibility for their own learning progress to also having to support each other in their learning endeavours, and jointly creating the learning content and context. Hence, Learning 2.0 offers the entire playfield where learners can and are encouraged to assume a pro-active role in the learning process and develop their own – individual and collective – rules and strategies for learning. Much more than just enhancing innovation at these three interrelated levels, social media support engages playful approaches, provides new formats for creative expression and encourages learners and teachers to experiment with different, innovative ways of articulating their thoughts and ideas. The Learning 2.0 landscape itself is shaped by experimentation, collaboration and empowerment, and allows learners and teachers to discover new ways of 4 Source: Redecker et all (2009), page 45 34 Management and Services actively and creatively developing their individual competences, which in turn provides a rich soil where further innovation and quality learning can flourish. Taking all this into consideration and the general fact demonstrated so far that emerging technology plays a key role especially for promoting interaction, delivering education and providing communication between individuals, we turn now to the crucial role of Learning 2.0 strategies in distance education. Several studies underlined the significance of interaction and the actual necessity of several interaction forms like student-teacher, student-student, studentcontent etc., contributing to the feeling of quality learning in distance education in particular. Many research studies reveal technology perceived as an enabler and intensifier of interaction, which leads at its turn to satisfaction of students, eliminating isolation feeling and effective learning outcomes (Chang et all, 2008; Cramer et all, 2007). Usluel & Mazman (2009) explained that distance learning systems use technology to separate learner from the teacher and learning group while maintaining the integrity of education process and attempting to replace the interpersonal communication and the inter subjectivity which is the essence of education transaction between teachers and learners, by a personal form of communication mediated by technology. Interaction in distance education is not limited to audio and video, or solely to teacher-student interactions, it must also represent the connectivity, the students’ feel with the distance teacher, aides, peers etc., otherwise without interaction students become autonomous, isolated and procrastinate and drop out (Usluel & Mazman, 2009). Therefore we can observe emerging technologies bringing out the necessity for more effective two way communication, promoting interaction and collaborative working, sharing and flexible participation, and also supporting the transition towards a distance learning system dominated by all these positive aspects. Moreover, emerging technologies not only have an impact on new ways of learning in distance education, but also on new models of teaching (Rennie & Mason, 2004). It is suggested that by the interactive technologies and medias which are provided by Web 2.0, these new pedagogic approaches that imply a closer relationship with students through active participation and effective twoways communication on virtual open platforms such as blogs or wikis are also supported. Considering distance education in very broad terms, everything we brought into discussion above is actually an only natural development in the field of education in general, following similar systematic developments in other domains as well. If we think about the many ways in which all sorts of human activities between peers situated in geographically dispersed locations have been enabled by new technologies of the Internet, we can definitely say it was only a matter of time before these technologies began to be widely utilised in long distance education. Web 2.0 tools improve the quality of the pedagogical act in such contexts, supporting it in interactive and multivalent environments, and offering a wide palette of applications to display learning content and materials, projects and assignments, groupwork and examinations, which will all enrich the experience of learners engaged in long distance education by making the entire process more lively, dynamic and engaging. Beyond this, Web 2.0 technologies offer the learner itself a vast array of supports for expression and exercise of the learned content, which highly upgrade its level of preparation before examinations. If before such tools were introduced long distance students were usually “served” course materials on a certain static online location where they would access it, accumulate it and then deliver it within organized examination sessions, things are totally different now, with the new media hosting all sorts of applications whose role is to make the course materials more accessible and to help students better understand the