Web 2.0 education: An evaluation of a large-scale European pilot

This paper appears in:
Next Generation Web Services Practices (NWeSP), 2011 7th International Conference on
Date of Conference: 19-21 Oct. 2011
Author(s): Connolly, T.M.
Sch. of Comput., Univ. of the West of Scotland, Paisley, UK
Hainey, T. ; Baxter, G. ; Stansfield, M.H. ; Gould, C. ; Tsvetkova, N. ; Kusheva, R. ; Stoimenova, B. ; Penkova, R. ; Legurska, M. ; Dimitrova, N.
Page(s): 511 - 516
Product Type: Conference Publications
Topic(s) : Communication, Networking & Broadcasting ; Components, Circuits, Devices & Systems ; Computing & Processing (Hardware/Software)
Conference Location : Salamanca
Print ISBN: 978-1-4577-1125-1
INSPEC Accession Number: 12405593
Digital Object Identifier : 10.1109/NWeSP.2011.6088232
Date of Current Version : 01 December 2011
Issue Date : 19-21 Oct. 2011

Abstract

The Internet represents a new industrial revolution, arguably with a more significant socio-economic impact than the previous two industrial revolutions. The impact of the Internet has resulted in significant changes within education with eLearning now an accepted and commonplace form of education. However, the online tools that are used in eLearning tend to be first generation Web tools rather than second generation, Web 2.0, tools. Some reasons for this are the lack of empirical evidence supporting their use in education, the perceived complexity of the tools and lack of training. This paper presents the results of a large-scale European pilot into the use of Web 2.0 tools across all educational sectors through an innovative and simple-to-use platform that allows teachers to customize which Web 2.0 tools they wish to use in their courses. >