Artybartfast

The implications of Web 2.0 for teaching and learning in a knowledge-based society.

Dr Tony Bates joined us by video link from Vancouver. He talked about the rapid expansion of the knowledge economy and the requirement for employees to have a new bank of transferable skills: problem-solving, critical thinking, communication, computing, independent learnership, entrepreneurship, initiative, flexibility, networking. The knowledge explosion has given rise to a need to be smarter rather than to know more stuff. This has affected a shift from objectivist to constructivist epistemology and a change in pedagogy.
There was a lot of discussion about this afterwards, with the usual arguments between people who don’t like dichotomies and people who don’t like continua, but the really useful bit of Tony Bates’ speech was his model for institutional implementation of learning & teaching (incorporating e-learning) strategy. There’s a presentation about this on his website. In summary, he strongly believes that the best model is one where an initial top-down decision gives rise to departmental or subject working groups where the use of e-learning within a specific subject area is discussed and decided upon.