Researching New Literacies: Web 2.0 Practices and Insider Perspectives by Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel

Lankshear and Knobel raise the issue of pirating with respect to cultural creation. Copyright infringements can become a large problem when working within a classroom in a multimodal environment and educators need to be aware, and make their students aware, of the appropriate ways to use others work within their own. If you look at how the arts are traditionally taught (or even other subject areas), there is an element of reproduction that needs to happen, whether it be reproducing an artist’s song with a band, trying out a particular art technique, or putting on a production of a play. Learning through reproduction can be an important learning process that individuals may need to explore to solidify their own understanding. It would merely be impossible to ask permission for all of your students to use preexisting works in their own work. The question then becomes how much of a preexisting work is too much? How much, or in which ways, does something need to be modified in order to call it your own? I believe that the reuse of others’ work and copyright issues lie on a very fine line and many times, how we use this work can be questionable. Using preexisting materials is important but we need to teach our students’ to be mindful of copyright infringement when allowing them to use these materials in their work. Another question that this raises for me is how do we teach this to our students, especially the younger ones that would have little to no experience with understanding the law? I suppose discussing issues like this would be a good start, but where do we go from there?

Lankshear and Noble state that “learners who have grown up on the inside of a cyberspatial mindset often see things very differently, and approach them very differently”. These types of people are highly functional when multitasking. I question that if this ability could end up being another process of evolution or if it is simply an external environmental factor that is acting up these younger generations. If individuals participate in many tasks successfully at the same time then they will be better prepared for the world outside of education. Allowing students to have the option to multitask would be extremely beneficial to individuals with A.D.H.D. Multitasking will allow these students to keep their hands busy (or even their minds busy) which can help them concentrate. However, are all students able to adapt to this type of environment or could it be devastating to their learning? Would it be best if we allowed students the option of how to do work? Would this eliminate all senses of classroom management, or would it just be shaped and formed in new ways to accommodate different types of engagements in learning?

Web 2.0 technologies have allowed for us to utilize folksonomy to tag items in a bottom up approach. It allows for many new connections to be formed and from a layman’s point of view. Is it possible that we are reorganizing the way we think about things because we now simply have the power in which to do so? Many of the preexisting classification systems were put in place by a specific group of people so it made sense to work from the top down. Opening up the classification systems to everyone allows for individuals to classify things in a way which makes the most sense to them. The average person would start to identify something by what it is, not from the most general term it could be. If we were going to identify “A” typically, we could call it an “A”, not a letter, or alphabet, or symbol. This way of identifying things seems to be the most logical way in which to do so. These classification systems also allow for a larger scope of collaborative learning to take place. People are able to more easily identify with others who share similar interests. These new web 2.0 technologies allow accessibility to everyone. One no longer needs to be in a position of authority in order to participate and work in a collaborative learning space.

Web 2.0 technologies have allowed for learning to move from the individual to the collaborative. Web 2.0 technologies allow for the connectedness of ideas to become more intertwined. It will be interesting to see the next step of the collaborative learning process as technology evolves.