Speaking at the FETC conference last week in Orlando, Chris Dede—Timothy E. Wirth professor in Learning Technologies at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education—suggested that educational evolution has created a gap between what he termed “Classic learning and knowing” and “Web 2.0 learning and knowing.” Dede asserted, “Thinking is now distributed across minds, tools and media, groups of people, and space and time.”

Web 2.0, Dede noted, is “centered around Web-based communities, where the central theme is to facilitate creativity, collaboration, and sharing.” It is an environment where knowledge is gained through bottom-up, individual methods, rather than top-down, traditional forms. “Web 2.0,” he said, “is a major paradigm shift in the way people think.”

Dede stressed the need to integrate these new modes of learning into educational objectives. “What we really want kids to graduate with,” he said, “is knowledge about knowledge; meta-knowledge.” Education, he insisted, should foster meaning making; it should emphasize the ability to convey ones own understanding to others.

In a related post, Xplanazine’s Susan Smith Nash discusses a variety of Web 2.0 applications that are being combined to create seamless and integrated user experiences. Like Dede’s presentation, Nash’s article explores the manner in which new software tools might be mixed and mashed together to achieve educational objectives.

A mashup, of course, combines web applications so that several can be integrated and viewed at the same time. Typical mashups import data that somehow relates to each other. Nash suggests that mashups might be used to pursue educational objectives in a number of ways; including:

• Quality control of information, sharing methods, etc.
• Increase participation and interaction within social networking spaces
• Create interesting interactive activities as a project
• Display for presentations

For more on Web 2.0 technology and education, check out T.H.E Journal’s summary of Dede’s FETC presentation and Nash’s full post at Xplanazine.