We are entering the age of collaboration. Web 2.0 has gone mainstream. An entire generation of students is arriving in our schools and universities, for whom Facebook is their most important source of information and communications.
Education is facing a tidal wave that threatens to overwhelm traditional pedagogical models and classroom concepts. How effective will lectures be when students learn by grazing on tens or hundreds of information feeds each day? How will they react to printed textbooks, when they believe that every document should be editable, commendable, and infinitely shareable? What is the meaning of the word "classroom" when video and mobile devices transmit the majority of knowledge?
Educators and educational institutions face their greatest challenge since the Industrial Revolution sparked the development of the public education system: Adapting a system whose foundations were laid in the 19th century to serve a 21st-century world.
The Rise of Social Media
The single biggest paradigm shift sparked by the Web 2.0 revolution has been the move from mass media to social media. In the traditional world of mass media, a specialized group of professional content producers created authoritative content, which was then distributed by an oligarchic publishing and broadcasting industry. Whether the end product consisted of summer blockbusters from Hollywood or the latest edition of "Macroeconomics," the consumer's only choice was whether or not to buy. Consumers consumed; only a few selected creators created.
The arrival of the internet began to change this paradigm, putting the ability to reach a global audience within the reach of anyone with a website. Yet the rise of social media really began with the invention of the blog.
Blogs are hardly advanced technology--in essence, they're simply websites that let writers post articles and let readers comment--but had a major impact because they were the first technology to make publishing into a social, interactive endeavor. They turned readers who were used to being consumers into participants.
As blogs trained an entire generation to talk back to content creators, other tools sprang up that took advantage of this newly kindled desire for self-expression. If blogging allowed anyone to operate their own newspaper or magazine, YouTube allowed anyone to create their own television and motion pictures. Social networks such as Facebook supercharged the entire movement by helping knit together previously implicit and loosely coupled groups with a near-instantaneous channel for communication. Within 24 hours, a single viral video can spread to millions of viewers through an interlinked network of online social ties.
Social Media + Productivity = Collaboration
Yet while this social media revolution has generated a tremendous amount of hype and attention, it has yet to create much value, either for the "real world" in general, or education in particular. Social networking activities for students remain, by and large, personal and non-academic. "Poking" friends or indicating your love of the comedian Stephen Colbert on Facebook may help pass the time, but it has little pedagogical value. Almost 22 million Facebook users use Slide FunSpace to share photos and videos. The most popular education app, Courses 2.0 (which allows students to tell their friends which courses they are taking) claims only 122,000 users, and has no direct teaching value.
The true value of social media will only be realized when its power is harnessed to drive increases in productivity. The intersection of social media and productivity is collaboration.
Collaboration is the true killer app of Web 2.0 in education. As more and more educators turn to team-based projects and collaborative learning inside and outside the classroom, they will learn to harness the power of social media for productive purposes. Rather than teens commenting on the latest YouTube music video, they will be collaborating online to conduct original research, all under the watchful eye of their instructors, who will be able to use these new technologies to monitor their progress and provide instruction at critical moments. Rather than "Poking" each other via Facebook, students will work together to synthesize many points of view into a single understanding.
