Over the past few years, adolescent online content creators and mass global users, have ushered in the manifestation of Tim Berners Lee’s vision of a“collaborative (Read/Write) medium” (Richardson, 2010, pg.1) with the development of cost free, accessible, uncomplicated, internet publishing tools. Availability to create weblogs, wikis, podcasts and various, other online applications has inspired a massive increase of internet readers and writers around the globe, all conceding to sharing their opinions, ideas, products, stories and creating online media. In 2009, “Technorate.com noted “133 million blogs” (Richardson, 2010, pg 2). In addition,




Wikipedia currently has approximately “ 3 million separate entries” on subjects from A to Z. Early on founder Jimmy Wales, compelled us to "Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge” (Richardson, 2010, pg 55). Today we are witnessing the reality that anyone who can read and write has the ability to create online media, and second by second, the world wide web is drawing closer to becoming “the sum of the source of all human knowledge”(pg.55) .




It’s all very exciting, but there is a downside from the perspective of education where many students exceed “their teachers in computer literacy” (Richardson, 2010, pg 6). Over the past few years, “tens of thousands of teachers… have begun using” (pg.6) technology tools to bridge the gap. These include blogs and wikis, which have a number of pedagogical uses and advantages. The web is flooded with resources for educators. This week’s coursework revealed the Top 100 Tools for Learning 2008 by Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies. http://www.c4lpt.co.uk/recommended/top100.html
Educators today face a number of challenges when instructing students to become efficient online “readers, writers…editors… collaborators and publishers” (pg. 6). In this Read/Write era where anyone can author online content, students must understand the anomaly of online data and the importance of testing authorship and authenticity prior to accepting it as accurate. Major, ongoing challenges for teachers remain in the area of ensuring student privacy and protecting their students from “inappropriate content” (12).




References




Richardson (2010).Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms (3rd ed) Corwin




West, J.A. & West, M.L (2009).Using Wikis for Online Collaboration: The Power of the Read/Write Web. John Wiley and Sons Inc.