Edu 2.0?

Posted on July 3, 2007 by David Gray

Most people who use the expression Edu 2.0 are making special reference to new online tools and technologies that are fueling a distance learning revolution. That's fine as far as it goes. But if all we do is focus on the technologies and what they enable across vast geographies, I believe we miss a major opportunity now to frame what is really happening in terms of the implications to educational goals and learning opportunities in this new era that transcend mere digital breakthroughs.

Edu 2.0 in my opinion should be about a whole lot more than the miracle of virtually free global Internet access and linkage. It's about a substantial reform to what has been for hundreds of years an evolving traditional system designed to render the best possible education for a majority of learners via a more or less rigidly chronological process.A highly effective system in that context, it did not, nor could not, contemplate a time when there would be any alternative, nor a time when changes in our cultures everywhere would inadvertently marginalize the hopes and aspirations of would-be learners who for a variety of reasons increasingly found the traditional option inaccessible, periodically unsustainable, untenable, or otherwise beyond reach.

Many of the implications of Edu 2.0 technologies upon learning are obvious, of course. Working men and woman can obtain college course instruction at a time, place and pace that suits them. An individual's physical proximity to traditional college facilities is made irrelevant. But if all we ever take from the emphasis on technology is that we can do what we always did except from a distance, then society has avoided the realization that today's combination of traditional and online instruction creates an educational synergy and options that transcend anything available ever before in the history of learning.

Traditionalists, for example, who battle the online option… and online-only advocates who would have us believe that traditional education has run its course… miss the main point entirely. It is the availability of the two options, availed separately or together over uninterrupted or sporadic intervals, that ultimately produces what should be everyone's new definition of modern learning. With the advent of the new tools and technologies along with traditional offerings, Edu 2.0 really means this: formal learning can at long last occur in a practical sense throughout one's lifetime; we can learn in an order and to a chronology that best suits the individual; today we finally have the best admixture of two learning systems that will offer students of any age the best choices at the best times to learn the most with respect to where they are in life, figuratively and literally.

Our latest innovations in sponsoring blended educational models speak to this very point. The model acknowledges that in some cases the combination of a virtual experience and a real-world experience creates a 'best of both worlds' result for some learners studying some disciplines. Achieving this outcome is the result of UMass campuses working collaboratively. In my view, it has resulted in the best possible combination of a distance learning opportunity with a hands-on component. In a way, it exactly symbolizes to me how the future of higher education is now becoming a bigger, broader, richer, and more available privilege thanks to the combination of the traditional and the new Edu 2.0 tools and technologies.