Press room

Some educators see the Web 2.0 as something to just upload their notes to and maybe have a forum on. What are they missing?

My approach is to look at what is working out in the Web 2.0 and try to see what lessons we can learn. And it seems like the projects that are successful there have an invitation to participate as a big part of that. It is the idea that individuals doing the things that they want to do can nonetheless be part of something bigger. The opportunity to offer feedback, the idea that a piece of media once created can be replicated, adapted and mixed with other pieces of content… That is very important. The other big lesson is that sometimes it is tempting for those of us who produce knowledge artefacts to try to make them perfect and polished. And if you look at the most successful examples of Web 2.0 culture, like the videos of Ze Frank or the Common Craft videos, they are relatively low tech. The energy, the ideas and an invitation to take those ideas further seem to be what is really important.

So the challenge is not technical anymore but cultural.

I believe increasingly so, although for those of us who like these tools it may seem easier to play with them than it really is. Because once you have used tagging in Flickr it makes sense when you see it in Delicious. Training and skills are important but I think at this point our energy needs to go towards engaging people in a really open and honest discussion about what our values and higher education should be. Because many of these changed values are just a connection with traditional academic values of sharing ideas, constantly iterating your ideas, challenging yourself, never resting on dogma…

However some educators see these new technologies as a threat.

I can understand that scepticism. Nobody likes to do something in a different way, especially if you can’t clearly demonstrate what the value is. The fact is I think higher education is under threat. We can’t take our position in culture or our funding for granted. There are a lot of really legitimate grounds to feel insecure, but I believe that if the university addresses those challenges head on it can actually thrive in a more open, disaggregated knowledge environment, really actively engaging the wider community.

As you just mentioned, one of the key points is to show that an innovation really adds value, which can be difficult sometimes.

It has only been in the last few years that we have been able to point to clear examples of this stuff working in the classroom to those saying “you are showing me fancy tools and trying to be cool, but how is this going to improve learning?” Now, every time I talk to an audience, the first thing I show them is a Wikipedia authoring project by Jon Beasley-Murray called “Murder, Madness and Mayhem”. What he did is, instead of telling the students “don’t go to Wikipedia because the content is very poor”, he told them “Wikipedia is very poor in our subject area, so your assignment is to create new entries and to make them really good”.

Wow, I wish I had a professor telling me something as challenging as that!

The students had never worked so hard on traditional essays in their lives, but they had an authentic learning experience and they got traditional and new media literacy skills. The final result is tremendous. It is estimated that 750,000 people view that article every year. And it cost the University very little money to do! So, from my perspective, now I can say to teachers use these fast cheap tools that are just waiting to be used, engage the community outside the university and tell your students that instead of just doing this essay just because you say you should, do it to create a public work that will be meaningful.

You love mashups. Can you explain in simple terms what a mashup is?

The term “mashup” comes from culture. It was the idea that DJs would take a piece of music, say a guitar from the Sex Pistols and then a vocal from Madonna, and then create a musical work that didn’t just sound like a joke, but like the components actually created something new.

You can do the same with images.

That was the next step. Then people started to extend that idea in terms of data. The idea is, for example, to combine photos taken by mobile phones with the phone’s GPS information to very precisely situate those images on to a map of Barcelona. Or combining the housing vacancies data in Vancouver coming from the classified ads with a map of the city, so you could see what neighbourhood these vacancies were in without driving all around town.

Sounds good. How can we apply this to education?

This is a very good question to ask. In many ways I have the same feeling I had fours years ago when people asked me about how blogs and wikis could apply to education. I think that if people are able to learn in more places, with more devices, if they get the information in a way they can control easily and in a way that is more meaningful to them, then the teachers and the learners will find a way to use that creatively. The ability to do more things with mobile devices is going to be important. I would expect creative teachers to start sending their students to document their communities, getting, for instance, the oral histories of people.

When using mashups you often have to trust four or five different data sources. What happens if one of them fails?

Yes. Or what if one of them isn’t accurate? A fellow in England figured out how to take data from Wikipedia on populations and put it on Google Maps. It seemed like a great thing. What happened was that the Wikipedia information wasn’t accurate if it was read without taking into account the contextual information explaining what the numbers meant. I’m frequently guilty of this attitude of “we can do it, so we should do it”, but now might be one of those times where technology is changing so quickly that we do need to be very careful to critically analyze every step. Data literacy doesn’t mean just being able to manipulate RSS feeds, it means being able to track things back and to assess the results. That is why I think it is so important for institutions of higher learning not to hide from technology. We have a very important role to play here. Our historic mission has been to provide critical and analytical responses to the society we live in and it seems to me that what you are describing is one of those challenges.

Yes, because, in the end, you can have a mashup made up of different mashups, so you don’t ultimately know where the information is coming from.

Yes. People who have that fear have every right to be fearful. But this is going to happen whether we engage this world or not. And I don’t think we have the option to say whether we will participate in the future or not. The future is going to happen. The question is: will we have an influence on it? I think that society will be much poorer if we don’t engage it and that we need to do it for selfish reasons, too.

What are the main objectives of your time at the UOC?

I was invited by Julià Minguillón to work specifically on a couple of projects. The core idea was how to take a collection of resources for statistics education that traditionally might have just been sitting in a database somewhere and create a learning experience using Web 2.0. I’ve had encounters with the UOC going back two or three years and I’ve always been so impressed by how progressive an institution it is in so many ways: in the way it thinks about teaching and learning as embedded in the way it works with its technology projects. There are so many gifted people who work here. Its engagement with the open education community is outstanding. They are really global leaders there.