Education.au has been engaged by the Australian Government’s Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations (DEEWR) to provide advice on emerging technologies and the use of ICT in education. The first report of this service was Collaboration in Teaching and Learning and the latest, focusing on Web 2.0 and site blocking in schools, has just been released. The report looks at identifying and overcoming barriers associated with site blocking with regards to Web 2.0 services. Important components of the report are the key findings and recommendations.
Key findings include:
- Web 2.0 provides rich opportunities for teaching and learning
- Site blocking is a necessary and key component of every school’s overall cyber-safety strategy
- Cyber-safety concerns head the list of barriers to the adoption of Web 2.0 in Schools
- Current Site blocking methods are blunt instruments when applied to Web 2.0 sites
- Unblocking Web 2.0 sites must be done within a clear policy framework
- Teachers need professional learning support in order to effectively use Web 2.0 in teaching and learning.
Recommendations:
- Establish a national collaboration to identify, promote and share best practice in the development and implementation of Web 2.0-style collaborative online learning policies within schools
- Establish a national collaboration to showcase and share tools and techniques in Web 2.0-aware content filtering, tools and safe access to rich media content.
2 Comments
Actually web 2.0 have made great impact over internet and web industry, and the entire way of looking internet have changed because of that, and i really like web 2.0 user interfaces and web technologies like XHTML and CSS markups.
I hope they look at embracing the idea of web 2.0 rather than just blocking it outright.
I know while i was attending school that much of what learned in computing class had very little to do with anything other than flow charts.
Then again, i attended a public school in Australia in the late 90’s before the internet had really taken off and the potential problems were not known.
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