Leonard_Mick_Web20

 Though nothing in my view will ever completely replace an in-person, communal learning environment, Web 2.0 comes rather close. It is becoming more frustrating each year as students not only expect to be using technology in every lesson, they are becoming more and more incapable of receiving instruction without technology. In the age of instant answers students become impatient learners because they know they can use half a dozen Web 2.0 tools to find any answer they want in less than a second. Thus, learning becomes an unnecessary task.   With that said, it is the educator's mission to instill a love of learning in our students. If we as educators are not using methods of information delivery that our students are familiar with, they will revert to seeing education as an unnecessary hassle. Mabrito and Medley mention in their article that we must find ways to give students more control over their learning environments and that today's students are not the linear thinkers we were even ten years ago. Students today must multitask learning as they have been raised that way.   There are a number of constraints to using Web 2.0 in the classroom. Besides the obvious "they're blocked at my school" comment, educators will have to be diligent in showing students how to use Web 2.0 tools for learning and not socializing. Web 2.0 tools will become a major distraction in class if the teacher has not well-planned and researched lessons. Using Web 2.0 will require much more planning time than is generally used for even a moderately technology based lesson. Granted, with software like Blackboard or Moodle the instructor may simply recycle the same class package from semester to semester; however, these packages need to be updated with newer articles, links and dates as technology changes each second.   Web 2.0 may alleviate some of the constraints on learning. I am particularly fond of the collaboration possibilities that one has with social media networks. Students are able to communicate with each other after class-hours on projects and homework. However, this still requires monitoring from the teacher to ensure that "bad" collaboration is not going on. As I mentioned before, since today's learners are not linear thinking, Web 2.0 learning opportunities enable students to learn about more than one topic at a time. I am particularly fond of self-paced modules. When teaching at a Naval training school, my students were able to complete certain courses at their own pace--and a whole staff of teachers were available for tutoring, immediate questions and guidance. Whereas student "X" was very good at one topic and could successfully complete a course in one week, student "Y" could take three weeks to master the material. Hence, Web 2.0 tools could alleviate some of the restrictions on learning as the author indicates. Another reason behind the success of Web 2.0 learning in the Navy was that representatives from the training software vendor were on site to make repairs and adjustments.  Teaching foreign languages is all about interaction and I have used some social networking in my class such as Second Life (which was a huge failure due to the school's computers being so poorly maintained), Skype (successful), LiveMocha (students lost interest rather quickly), Google Docs (was good for peer editing), and MySpace (which just shows you how long ago I used that one last!!). I would say that there was a fifty percent success rate. The fifty percent fail rate was due to the fact that many of these Web 2.0 tools are in fact huge distracters. In order for social networking to work in class, it will be up to the teacher to diligently monitor and plan lessons and it will be up to the administration to ensure that the technology available is capable of handling what we demand of it.