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education in web 2.0

I was browsing through Time magazine today, and I ran across a rather fascinating article entitled "How to Bring Our Schools Out of the 20th Century." It offers an interesting perspective on what skills the current generation of children need to have in order to succeed in the future. It criticizes Bush's No Child Left Behind Act as more teachers are focused on drilling basic math and reading skills into children instead of fostering creative thinking. In today's global economy, today's children need to know more than basic arithmetic and English. They need to be able to "think through abstract problems, work in teams, distinguish good information from bad, or speak a language other than English." Essentially, today's global economy demands that today's children be global students and ready to locate, sort, and determine relevant information.

How can "Learning 2.0" be achieved? What does it require? Scott McNealy, chairman of Sun Microsystems, came up with an interesting solution as he attempted to searched the Web for a simple yet dynamic explanation of electricity that his third-grade son could understand. After hours of searching, he ran into a site that explained electricity simply but it was meant for welders. A lightbulb switched on inside McNealy's head as he went on to create an educational website for K-12 students that is browser based and free.

By drawing on the Wikipedia model, he created Curriki that created a collection of online courses that can be updated, improved, modified, and shared by innovative educators. This site made its debut in January 2006 and has experienced tremendous growth. There are currently more than 450 courses in the works, and thousands of people joined as members. Although Curriki is not meant to replace the in-person interaction among students, teachers, and parents, the website is a great way to complement students' eagerness for knowledge and learning to their current education. Personally, my friends and I learn a lot of interesting things via Internet than at school. With UChicago's emphasis on theory, we always looked for ways to apply theory to practice. Whether we peruse through the business and finance sections of the Wall Street Journal or use our critical thinking skills to work through actual business problems, personally it's nice to know that economics can still valuable vs. any knowledge of finance or accounting.

I do like this idea of a collaborative learning environment through the web. What would be more intriguing is how they incorporate media such as video and sound files into these courses. As the Internet encourages user-driven content, companies and NGOs are surely taking notice. Curriki's partners cover a diverse range including but not limited to the UN, Sun Microsystems, Elluminate, and XWiki.com. The Board of Director and Advisors reflect the global commitment by the site as these people came from a variety of disciplines, backgrounds, and countries. Much innovation is coming from the interdisciplinary approaches across fields and people. These online collaborative learning environments would be a great additional tool to learning foreign languages. Although I speak two languages (German and Korean) other than English at varying levels, I would like to have an opportunity to improve my fluency in these languages. Although the Curriki site's search engine suffers from too much traffic, it seems that it is a little difficult to find the relevant courses I need to practice. There should not be too much worry though. Given the high-powered sponsors and partners, Curriki has an excellent support base to lean on and continue its expansion.

posted by Koh @ 4:55 PM