Trent Batson argues that Web 2.0 is "no longer just for the geeks" in Why Web 2.0 is Important to Higher Education. The ease at which the web can now be used opens up a whole new methodology of communication, one which he argues is an improvement upon traditional teacher-student learning. Batson primarily focuses on the impact of Web 2.0 on the classroom setting, and how it can be used as a tool to facilitate education. Bryan Alexander, in his article Web 2.0: A New Wave of Innovation for Teaching and Learning, addresses the potential impact of the web on accessibility. He emphasizes the organization of web pages in Web 2.0 as being more coherent to the average person than those pages of Web 1.0, a similar perspective to the opening argument of Batson. However, Alexander focuses on the way in which this difference is created: by the invention of micro-content and metadata tagging.
Both articles make the argument that by networking computers and connecting people together the intention is to increase the potential for learning to occur. Bryan Alexander puts the most emphasis on openness. In his article, he describes the ability for people to create, edit, and read the content of web-pages as imperative to their ability to facilitate learning. Batson addresses how the open micro-content web-pages fit more in line with human nature than book reading or teacher-student learning. Together, the two articles provide a convincing argument for why Web 2.0 has the potential to change the way we learn.
This is a well-written blog entry, but it fails to point out that many similarities, and just a few differences. I feel as though in your first paragraph, rather than summarizing what each author wrote for each article, you could have pointed out a lot more of the many similarities that exist. In the second paragraph you did a better job isolating certain aspects about each article as being different, but at the same time they aren't really matched up against each other in order to show the full contrast. At the end of the last paragraph, your conclusion sentence related the two articles again, but technically it is still part of what is supposed to be the contrast paragraph, so maybe it doesn't quite fit in.
ReplyDelete