new media age

\r

Blogs, podcastsDanielthe 2ista new age of

magine 19th century Scotsman James Pillans

using his inventions of the blackboard and

coloured chalk, his students in rapt attention to

an exploration of the potential of learning in the

21 st century. We've certarnly come a long way

from blackboard and chalk and, of course, it

takes more than a blackboard lo empower

customisation and interactivity in a global

classroom. But beyond shinier teaching tools, the

gadgets and features that populate our daily lives

define expectations which drive innovation in

academia. In many ways these expectations, far more

Uian design, are the tail that has the dog wagging

when we look to today's revolution in e-learning.

Barely noticing the "gee whiz" stage, we're

already past "ho-hum" and grappling with the Next

Big Thing.

But like most Big Things, their roots snake past

the hype and emerge from innovations seldom hailed

as such; small conveniences with huge

consequences. Hello e-leaming 2.0.

The eariy years A new age

One of these small conveniences was born of a

singular inconvenience to New York City street

sweepers, when in 1886 the first Ticker Tape parade

spontaneously erupted during a celebration of the

dedication of the Statue of Liberty,

The Ticker, a quaint device introduced to Wall

Street some years before, provided brokers with a

constant stream of stock and commodity prices

punched into strips of white paper.

The only problem with this amazing innovation

was (if you don't count the tons of paper New

Yorkers felt compelled to shove out a window at the

occasional passing motorcade) if you weren't

amongst the crowd interested in the price of pork

bellies and such, you still had to run for your

information.

Even the huge glowing ticker, the "Zipper", that

brought up to the minute news as it scrolled across a

building in Time Square, was 40 years away.

in the dawn of the 21st century, many of us had a

quaint device of our own, although while we weren't

running for the specific information we desired, we

had to surf for it. Then Netscape offered MyNetscape

users a little feature they called RSS, An acronym for

Rich Site Summary, or Really Simple Syndication,

depending on who you talk to, this allowed us to

configure our own personal ticker.

Suddenly each of us with an internet connection

and a PC could have our own stream of information

right to our desks. What began as a source of

consolidated news streams has evolved into a means

of information delivery of every imaginable subject.

Fed to your mobile, PDA, or computer via RSS

aggregators are updates of everything under the sun,

even going so far as to convert text into voice via

VoiceXML and making RSS information available to

anyone with a phone. E-learning 2.0 applications

include announcements of class assignments.

i6 October two thousand & seven e*learning age

new madia age

subject-specific news and views, distributtoo of studygroup contents and Blog updates.

Blogs are themselves a humble inheritor of bigdeal status. In 2004, dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster called "Blog" their "Word ot the Year" fortopping, by a wide margin they said, the wordssearched for on their public and subscriptiondictionary services. Today, e-learning finds blogs aresource for the distribution of opinions andinformation t)etween teacher and students andamongst students and peers. It must be impossibleto find a university without at least one - and in mostcases - countless biogs by students and professorscovering subject-specific topics. Blogs routinelymake use of hyperlinks which allow the reader tojump among various citations, references and sub-topics. With Technorati, a tracker of blogs, currentlyreporting just over 80 million biogs up from less than60 million in October 2006 on the radar, one mightdoubt Gartner Group predicting blogs will top out ataround 100 million. There is no doubt, however, thatblogs are an influential component of any e-learning2.0 environment.

Over-interactive

hands of ttie people quickly followed. Today podcastsare a commercial and cultural phenomenon.

The wealth of knowledge

Sharing the stage with blog-ites are the podcasters,Podcast, itsetf a portmanteau of Playable On DemandBroadcasting, not to be confused with AppleCorporation's iPod, is a vital component of e-learning2 0. Delivering via video, audio, picture, or document,podcasts can convey lectures, lesson plans,recordings of debates, even homework presentations.Unlike blogs, podcasts are generally a one-waypresentation of content, much like radio or TV. Whatmakes the podcast so different from these media isits capacity to be automatically downloaded to yourdevice via software capable of reading feed formatssuch as RSS. Beginning just a few years ago as ameans to deliver snippets of internet radio, the abilityto put ttie power of production and delivery in the

The mid-1990s saw the development of a web-based engine designed to give visitors the ability toedit, add and erase content. The first wiki, theHawaiian word for quick, arose as websiteWikiWikiWeb developed by Ward Cunningham. Out ofthis approach to collaborative authoring emerged,amidst controversy, an open source encyclopediawritten through contribution by ordinary peoplecalled Wikipedia. On the surface, the idea of anencyclopedia whose authorship is open to any and allmight appear a bit of madness. I mean, really, anencyclopedia edited in part by my weird uncle Phil?As it turns out, the objectivist-inspired approach toreference material emerges as pretty reliable in astudy by the British journal Nature, which in 2005found few differences between Wikipedia and theEncyclopedia Britannica, Today, the idea of a wiki is avibrant component of e-learning 2,0 environments.Found in both the open web and intranets, wikismake for dynamic resources of information. As e-tearning reaches across cultural, social, and politicalboundaries, the audience perspective is reflected bytheir own contribution.

One of the blessings of the web is access to awealth of information. Doe of the curses of the web ismanaging that fortune. How do we come to grips withnavigating a vast ocean of data, whose currents andtides are ever changing? Tagging is emerging as away to mark content and find it again. A few monthsago, the Pew Internet & American Life Project foundthat nearly a third of US intemet users surveyed havetagged or categorised online content such as photos,news stories or blog posts. In addition to being highlypersonalised, tagging also has a social aspect as,unlike keywords or bookmarks, tags are shared.Tagging represents a tremendous potential towards

enhancing and enabling e-leaming environments.Tagging is a reflective exercise, which provides thestudent a chance to arrange and catalogue newthoughts. Exposures to others' tags give the studentinsights to peer perspectives, spurring and informingcollaboration. Tags can even be used by educators toglean an insight to a student's comprehension. Today,Learning Management Systems don't have taggingfunctionality; look for that to change.

College life

We touched on a social facet of tagging being theability to share definitions and categories amongstcontributors, building a "folksonomie" of sorts. Forboth e-learning, and the web as a whole, there aresocial networking tools linking blogs, broadcasting,instant messaging •- Imagine a pursuit and you'll finda network full of like-minded people talking up thecause. The world is a campus.

The computer or you?

In 1982, Time Magazine named Person of the Yearthe computer This machine has transformed ourlives in countless ways. Among these changes,certainly, is the way we learn and no bettertestament to that is found in Time's choice for 2006;"You". Our needs and quests, our nagging doubts,our big questions, all of these and more are beingexplored in ways no one could have predicted wayback In 1982. The next generation of e-leaming toolsis no different, Dur classrooms and campuses willleverage applications and platforms borne of featuresemerging in the daily experiences of today's youth.What does that look like? What's e-learning 3.0 andbeyond have in store? I'm not sure, but I do knowwe're going to need a lot more chalk.

Daniel Hunter, President ofInteractyx (Americas) Inc 0

e>learnirig age October two thousand & seven 17