Internet, as Barlow argues, is “the biggest technological event since the the capture of fire in terms of what it will do to the basic look and feel of being a human”. This technological event has profoundly changed so many taken-for-granted and heavily entrenched concepts including education.
The educational framework that was once designed to meet the burgeoning demands of the industrial revolution was until recently the dominant approach to instruction in our schools. This approach stood sturdy in the face of the new learning theories that were mushrooming particularly in the field of cognitive science and neuroscience starting from the early 40s of last century.
However, this status quo has been radically shaken with the first version of the web or what is called web1.0 or the static web but the core was still the same : traditional methods of instruction in which the teacher is the sage on the stage and the only irrefutable source of knowledge. Education was still unidirectional and students were passive consumers of content.
Tools like blogs. wikis, social bookmarking and organizational sites proliferated in such a rate that millions of blog posts are published on a daily basis. These principles of active production, collaboration, sharing, publishing and social bookmarking were transferred to education and hence the nomenclature ” Education 2.0″.
In education 2.0, teachers are still the source of knowledge but they started adopting some new and more open roles like being guides, mentors, and helpers. And though education 2.0 is heavily digitized but it was still operating within the same framework of education 1.0. What happened in education 2.0 was only an evolution and not revolution.
According to Derek et al. education 3.0 “is characterized by rich, cross-institutional, cross-cultural educational opportunities within which the learners themselves play a key role as creators of knowledge artifacts that are shared, and where social networking and social benefits outside the immediate scope of activity play a strong role “.
The chart below created by Derek et al. summarizes the core differences between the three generations of education.
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| source:http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1625/1540#k2 |
