Review by: Poortman, Sybilla (2006-11-10)

Regular visitors of educational weblogs must have hit upon Will Richardson’s weblog (or a reference to it). Weblogg-ed.com has existed for almost five years. What this means to Will is expressed in the following quote: “In the years that I have kept my blog at Weblogg-ed.com, I have learned more about the world, more about education, more about people, and more about myself than in my 40-odd non-blogging years, 20 of them spent as a classroom teacher.” He says this is a book not so much about technology, but about “connections, collaborations and conversations”.

The reason why I keep enjoying reading Will’s weblog, is his never failing enthusiasm. It is one of the few weblogs where you won’t find any nagging about incompetent, ignorant, or unwilling educators. When confronted with adversity or stagnation, Will will always look for reasons and causes, and suggest suitable solutions. Very inspiring indeed.

This positive attitude is also felt in his book. A true advocate of Web 2.0, he discusses a number of applications that are very instructive to a relative beginner in the field. The book has a low threshold; theory and technology are discussed briefly, and are followed by ample appealing examples that are often directly applicable in education.

The following subjects are discussed in order:

• Read/Write Web: Will’s hobby horse, and an already old-fashioned name for the popular term, Web 2.0. What is meant here is that we increasingly move from a passive web use to an active use. A more apt name would perhaps be "read/write/publish/edit/collaborate" web. A kind of introduction.
• Weblogs: Pedagogy and Practice: Good catalogue of the possibilities for education offered by weblogs, with examples taken from all levels of education, (from primary to academic).
• Weblogs: Get Started! Finally a comprehensible manual for educational staff to really get started. It pays much attention to matters that are relevant to education, such as privacy and security.
• Wikis: Easy Collaboration for All: Using Wikipedia as an example, the principle and possibilities of Wikis are explained, followed by examples and a discussion of various wiki tools.
• RSS: The New Killer App for Education: RSS rightly takes central stage in the book. Again, first the book gives an explanation of how it works (without the technical details), followed by examples from use in education and practical tips for application and maintenance of RSS feeds.
• The Social Web: Learning Together: Social bookmarking services are taking off, and the possibilities seem endless. Communities are created due to the social aspect of sharing information (sources) within a group. Knowledge building gets a new dimension because it exists between rather than with individuals. Will calls this “learning as a conversation”. New applications can be found daily that offer possibilities for extending and streamlining all sorts of tasks in education, with respect to both organisation and content.
• Fun With Flickr: Creating, Publishing, and Using Images Online: To many people Flickr seems just an online photo album, and this is how they use it. However, it has offered extended possibilities for quite a while to the more adventurous teacher. One of Flickr’s strengths is facilitating online communities in which anonymous or secure collaboration is possible. Using Creative Commons licences you can select whether your own photos can be used, and what restrictions apply. This is giving rise to an unequalled collection of photographic material that is largely freely accessible and available for use. To illustrate this: in October 2004 Flickr contained nearly 1 million photos; currently it increases by about 1 million photos each day. The situation on 27 August 2006: 230 million photos!
• Podcasting and Screencasting: Multimedia Publishing for the Masses: This is no overstatement. Besides the well-known ‘broadcasting’, an era of ‘narrowcasting’ has dawned, which allows anyone who owns a computer plus Internet connection to provide an audio/video transmission for a very specific audience. Will provides handy tips on how to get started and shows that it can be really easy. Here too many URLs are provided so you can see for yourself. This shows the weak spot of printed publications on this subject: appealing examples are a must (especially with someone whose writing is so compelling that readers will want to read his book next to their computers), but they are often outdated once they are in print.

What It all Means: Advanced readers will find this the most interesting chapter by far, as it deals extensively with the new information skills that these possibilities on the web require from us. A dozen ‘big shifts’ are being identified, shifts that have far reaching consequences for learning as well as teaching. Many of these shifts are a logical result of the possibilities mentioned above that Web 2.0 provides. Teachers who have been following these developments will have been expecting these consequences. For one thing, learners will increasingly make online contact (and more often after school hours) with other teachers than their own and with experts in a certain field. Will calls this “Many, Many Teachers, and 24/7 Learning”. Shift nr 10 was a true eye-opener to me. The technologies mentioned will enable teachers and learners to contribute to the gigantic source of knowledge that the web offers. This will change the perspective on what students hand in at the end of an assignment. What was previously only seen by the teacher, can now be put online and can contribute to our common knowledge. “Contribution, not Completion, as the Ultimate Goal”.

Compare for example a book such as “Door de bomen het bos: informatievaardigheden in het onderwijs" (“The wood for the trees: information skills in education”, see the review on this site), which mainly discusses the classic information skills that are increasingly applied digitally. To Will, information literacy encompasses everything from searching and handling to processing information. He provides tangible links to educational applications for every phase of this process.

To the beginner who doesn’t see the wood for the trees, Will provides easy tips throughout the book as to which tool should be used where. He introduces blogs and Wikis as tools for social interaction with an emphasis on content and meaning, and explains that the emphasis with social bookmarking tools is on creating connections and communities. They complete the circle of the Read/Write Web: RSS enabled us to learn about and react to what others write (in blogs and Wikis, for example), social bookmarking tools allow us to also learn about (and react to) what others read.

Conclusion: this is a great guide for those who have yet to start with social software. It is an easy read and provides many examples that make you eager to get started. The advanced social software user will of course see much familiar stuff, but this target group also has much to gain, especially from the last chapter which clearly details the meaning of social software for education. The extensive focus on information skills is also positively remarkable.

As the information in the book’s examples is quickly outdated it is a pity that this title has not been published online. Apart from that it is absolutely recommended.

This review is originally published on the SURF E-learning Themesite http://e-learning.surf.nl