ABSTRACT
In this book we argue that there is an urgent need to rethink some emerging web technologies for use in the primary school classroom. We intend to demonstrate that there are compelling reasons for embedding the use of these tools within processes of learning and teaching, but before we start to expand on this theme, we need to answer one fundamental issue: what are these ‘new web tools’? For many people the World Wide Web and the internet are synonymous. The
terms are often used interchangeably because it was the creation of the World Wide Web in the very early 1990s that made the technical infrastructure of the internet accessible to the majority of people. The internet had been around for almost 30 years before this point, but it was not until the development of what we now refer to simply as ‘the web’ that this technology started to make dramatic impacts on our lifestyles (Naughton 1999). The web itself is founded on innovations like hypertext – the concept of creating
‘clickable’ links that are embedded into the content of a page and allow navigation between documents – and web browsers – simple software applications that display web documents and manage our navigation as we move between them. These are still the fundamental building blocks of modern internet use; few of us could recall or even imagine an internet without them. Nevertheless, the World Wide Web and the ways in which we interact with it have changed radically over the last 20 or so years. The most obvious of these changes is seen in activities like social networking, blogging,
media sharing and the creation of large scale collaborative undertakings like wikis; activities that involve ordinary users in the process of content creation. In the early years of the World Wide Web, these kinds of activities were relatively limited. Creating web content required considerable expertise and some cost to the contributor. Today, much more of the content that people encounter on the web has been created by ordinary users in the course of their day to day activities. Importantly, they have been able to do this with the kinds of skills acquired through basic word processing and e-mail communication and at no personal expense. This has inspired the creation of terms like the ‘participatory web’ or the ‘read/write
web’ or, most commonly ‘Web 2.0’ (O’Reilly 2005). Such terms are often criticised because they create the impression that the web has somehow changed. This is misleading, but the World Wide Web does look and feel different now to how it looked and felt ten years ago. The technologies that underpinned this explosion in user generated content have been around for almost as long as the web itself. Mark Zuckerberg’s initial versions of what we now know as Facebook were based on a well established kind of web tool that invited users to compare and rank pairs of photographs. Flickr, a popular photo-sharing website,
was originally part of an online gaming site known as a Massive Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG), which derived from a form of online entertainment known as MUDs (Multi User Dungeons) and therefore predated the invention of the web itself. However, the development of these technologies into the creation of easy to use tools
was relatively recent. In both the cases outlined above, the reworking of old technologies led to a phenomenon that was never anticipated by the original creators. Zuckerberg watched from his college dormitory as his ‘Facebook’ spread virally, first through his college and ultimately around the world. The owners of Flickr ended up shelving their game site and focused on the much more popular photo-sharing service instead. In each case the development of services that gave users control over the content and presentation of web pages appeared to tap into a strongly felt and previously unsatisfied need, to be able to express oneself in an online environment. In this book we are interested in the tools that underpin services like Facebook and
YouTube and Flickr, tools that can be accessed independently on the web or via school based internet services like Virtual Learning Environments. All of them allow users to create and share content in a social environment and so are referred to here as social software. However, let us be clear, what are these new tools that we are talking about and what do they actually allow us to do?
