Ramón Ovelar Beltrán's position paper

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Position Paper

Ramón Ovelar Beltrán Content Manager at E-learning resource site Púlsar

Campus Virtual - Universidad del País Vasco / Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea

Web based applications can offer some advantages to Internet users, particularly in the educational scope, such as a bigger ability to publish in the Internet, new ways of collaboration, a brand new perspective of searching and organizing content based on the social networks, the disappearance of the traditional boundaries of the learning communities (subjects, groups, rooms…) and a new sense of identification of the learner with his own work. Intimacy has not really been discussed. The big topic around Web 2.0 and education has been the debate about the usefulness of these applications, traditional structured content in front of “aggregated content”, encyclopaedia in front of Wikipedia.

Internet users are mostly concerned about spam and viruses: people are annoyed when they find their box of letters filled with propaganda brochures or when they think their data are in danger and so they are sensitive about this kind of issues. But they are not worried when they fill the (quite often) short form of friendly Web 2.0 companies offering free but original and interesting services based on open standards.

Nevertheless, this issue is beginning to arise. Most of these friendly companies have been bought by one the Web 1.0 survivors. What these big servers store is much more than our mails and personal data: they keep track of our habits and preferences and have sometimes a free license on our content. We see how Gmail track the text of our personal messages to put some related advertising aside and people is getting aware of it. Beside this, others concerns related to social software and education hit the news. This summer, because of the worry of children safety in the Internet, the House of Representatives of the USA has voted an act with the intention of banning social network sites in school and libraries.

Therefore, while on the one hand we have some good advantages in al these applications that are really suitable for education, on the other we face some “bottlenecks” that can endanger the profit we want to take from them. First of all, as registered users of these applications, our actions produce data that remain in their system and that can be used for commercial purposes. Second, there are no guarantees that current terms of usage will be maintained in the future, so we can be trapped in an unwanted situation, such as happen with proprietary software that forces us to updated versions and fares. Third, the problem of children safety in social networks is emerging and, even if arguable, one of the reactions is to ban them from the schools. Finally, we see that, even if the technology allows different nodes of a network through open standards and open APIs, the current trends are centralization in big systems that make us think of a “Big brother is watching you”.

A recent article of Nancy White on the characteristics of blog communities cited a list of six relevant aspects of networks: filters, amplifiers, convenors, facilitators, investors and community builders. We can easily identify what are the components of the blogging scope that match with these elements of any network. For the investor one, the article, obviously, points at companies that deliver software. But, as we said before, education needs a specific situation able to balance the power of companies on users. But, who is going to take baton from these companies?

Can we learn from the business case of open source LMS? Every time an educational institution has chosen an open source LMS it has been an investor for the community of developer, giving them more chances to grow. And sometimes they had even work together with the community, helping to improve the product. But, in these applications there are no vendors and licence fees, so why should institutions take charge of the work of running these applications when they are already running and translated to a considerable number of languages? Well, some of the “bottlenecks” listed before can motivate institutions to engage an open source based strategy. And maybe we can point some other reasons beyond these “bottlenecks”, as to convey some of the reliability of the institution to this site.

Still there is another problem, because Web 2.0 communities have no boundaries. If these tools depend on an institution and will let people work only within the institution, most of the usefulness will disappear. We can imagine a COP working like this but no a growing space where networks and communities interact together. What’s the point of Del.icio.us if I don’t have the “crowds” working together? There is maybe a possibility of federating such systems, as repositories are doing, but this will not be a easy technical issue.

Another solution for the intimacy and safety issues would be to keep our data under a sort of digital signature that will log in into systems without storing our personal details in every application. I don’t know anything about the technical viability of this solution but I think that could be worth investigating.

As a conclusion I would say that, if we can consider Web 2.0 as new generation media, we can maybe try to learn something about traditional media. Whatever they were, journal, radio or television, they have live on the advertising and the public funding. Web 2.0 media can also live on the marketing research they can do. Therefore, as it happen with old media, a balance between public funded, alternative and commercial would be likely to appear. Intute can be an example of the former. (public funded, I mean).

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