 So thank you so much for taking the time for this interview and first for those who didn't attend the interesting session today Please can you introduce yourselves and the the field of experience that you have? Okay, so my name is Patricia Sutherland. I'm the library manager at the College of the North Atlantic I'm Brett Williams. I'm the systems librarian at the College of the North Atlantic So first would like to of course we thank you so much for attending the ICT and education conference And your session was about 23 things that teachers can integrate in their education So you also labeled it as learning 2.0 So what is your definition of the term and how is it different from the conventional learning that we know? Well learning 2.0 is is another name for the for the program and Basically what it means is learning about web 2.0. They call web 2.0 the social web It involves learning about the tools that involve interaction on the website Collaboration creating content. It's a very different environment than when the internet first started Yeah web web 2.0 is about collaboration. It's about working group work There's a lot of technologies that enhance that like blogs or someone posts And then there are comments afterwards or wikis where multiple people can come together and create Something that's greater than any of them could have created by themselves And what's great about this program is that you need to use web 2.0 tools To complete the program to learn about that So as a teacher, why should I use web 2.0? What benefits would I get or will I give to my students? But really there's your students are using them anyway Your students are on the internet and they're using them and they may not be using them in a way that is helpful to their education or that Let's them learn what they should about Understanding how people put web 2.0 Websites together how people use them and for instance wikipedia If someone just accepts what someone wrote without understanding that many people have come together to create Then they don't really understand how How the process works, and I think you know the children of today have grown up from birth many of them with technology They expected they learned it. They're different. I think as teachers It's it's imperative that you keep the students engaged And you also prepare them for a knowledge economy and knowledge society and that knowledge economy and knowledge society involves Using these tools because they will be using them as they get older in further education and in the workplace So There is a debate whether Facebook and social media are beneficial Tools of education in schools. So are you with or against using them as educational tools? Well, you know Facebook everyone laughs and says it's the pictures of the kids and they're they're with their friends, but many of the really Progressive schools Libraries and and other institutions that that are concerned with education of children are going to where the children are and the kids Are befriending them and it's a nice way then to precisely be able to add a little more control Into the children's experience with web 2.0 Really when you ban Facebook That doesn't take away the fact that it exists and that the students are using it So being there Having if the students know that the teacher is there or that their parents are online and are watching what they do on Facebook then they are going to Perhaps be a little bit more careful or the teacher or the parent may be able to spot something that the student is doing and Correct it before it becomes a bigger issue And you know on top of it to the students they're used to interacting Like Facebook short text easy throw up a picture short This is how they're used to interacting and I think as Educators you can use that form that form of communication Mm-hmm like Facebook and make a presence and and the students So you mentioned that are more than three million Wikipedia pages in English being currently available So with Wikipedia being currently so heavily used do you think that can be a credible source of Educational information or it rests only as an opinion and not something we can rely on Well, we're librarians and and really we spend a lot of time teaching Authority and evaluating information on the internet and Wikipedia is a fabulous place to start. We always tell students before you do the project get a sense of your subject Mm-hmm, and Wikipedia is a great place to start read it No, don't don't put it in your bibliography or earn your reference list or or the quote from it because it is not It's an opinion piece as far as I'm concerned. It's not an authority Again, yeah Wikipedia is a beginning. It's it's a place to start and what it does is it gives you a quick overview just like looking at the encyclopedia Britannica or the world book encyclopedia gives you a quick overview, but no one no one even When I used a paper encyclopedia, you don't write your paper based on a paper encyclopedia You use it to start and then you move on from there So you mentioned regarding this topic you mentioned there is a comparison that has been taken place recently between encyclopedia britannica and wikipedia right on there it was um it was Written about written up about in in the magazine called nature And what they did is they looked at error rates in the encyclopedia britannica and wikipedia and they found there was no substantial difference Which is really quite fascinating. I believe that I'm reading a book recently Right now actually it's called drive and it's by this this man daniel pink who also wrote about how right brainers He's very much involved in that whole thomas freedman flat the world is flat idea And and it's interesting because wikipedia is probably the worst business model and if any one had ever You know put money or whatever on it when it first started they would have said there's no way that this will succeed It's run by volunteers Everything else and it has outshot Well, its rival at that time was encarded by by microsoft that had all the money You know, it's it's amazing Um what wikipedia is and there are a lot of very very smart people out there And they do it for free and they do it for fun The other thing about wikipedia is it doesn't have a page limit And which means you get some really funny things like page after page after page of articles about episodes of tv series But wikipedia also has a history of all the different edits that have been done So if you look at Excuse me if you look at a wikipedia page about a political figure You can see as people make edits over the course of that political figure's career How things have changed and how people How people view the person and there's since there's no page limit You don't have to cut all of that out with the encyclopedia britannica. That's invisible That's in experts heads in experts papers with wikipedia. All that history is right there in front of you Actually, you know, that's fascinating because that could be a new form of social sciences is looking at social analysis Yeah, that's fascinating. I didn't know that It's the advantage of a wiki Okay So mentioning wikis. Is it any different from blogging or are they just two representations of the same idea? Well, really when you get back to the very basics of the web the web is designed to be interconnected and Really the collaboration that you do on a wiki and the collaboration you do on a blog A lot of it is the same some of them run on the same technologies on the back on the back end Um, but a wiki is really The way that it looks at the beginning is that there is no author That there is a collaborative. It's a group effort. A blog is very clearly as one author Or a group of authors that write an article and then there are comments about it below A wiki may be the product of hundreds of people who have edited and added links and changed things around But a blog really contains standalone articles a blog is more like a journal A wiki is more like an encyclopedia Yeah so some people say that web 2.0 may kind of overtake or Illuminate the role of teachers and that students won't need any teachers in the future since they have all what they need In web 2.0. So what do you think of this idea? You know they say at the same about libraries that with the internet there would be no more books and libraries And if anything, I think there's we've seen now that there's probably increase in book buying and interest in books As there is in the internet the whole thing's going up Actually, I think the role of teachers now is more crucial than ever Because you need individuals who understand Information is there's a plethora of information out there now You need individuals who can understand it sift through it present the best help the students Sift through it and then also have that sound sort of pedagogical learning To design a curriculum that can enhance the learning process by both in the classroom And using the tools So I think just you know, the sky is not falling for educators I think they're probably going to be needed more than ever but the skills that they have will also have to change Yeah skills skills have changed there are things you need to know There are things that you need to change in the way the curriculum is developed But the basics things like is this a reliable source or not? It's the same as whether you're looking at a book in front of you or looking at a website What do you look at you look at who the author is Does had Has she Been a member of any associations does she publish a lot on this? Do I know any of the work of the authors? She's cited and if you look At that on a On a book you're going to do the same thing on a webpage Do I know the man who wrote this article does he participate in any in any associations? It's the same it's the same process in determining what's reliable information and what's not It's just in a little bit of a different form And actually they find now with the explosion of information on the internet and this this fabulous idea now that anyone can post and create content If anything that role of filtering and teaching how to filter is more important Than ever and again, I'm going to go back to thomas freedman and primarily because he was here And it was a fascinating lecture. I mean I just loved it You know and he said he said that that You know the internet does not come with a already being pre-approved sign on it It's just out there out there And it's up to us now to develop those skills to develop them in the children on how to responsibly ethically and with um critical thinking Take that information what's there and then be able to apply The the term that gets thrown around sometimes is curated content Which is it's a hot new thing which people who are experts gather together lists of things That they know about that are reliable sources Which librarians have been doing since the It's a new term for a very very old thing There it was papyrus now is you know, this invites, right? So I'm sure many of the teachers attended the session wanted to know How can they get their their schools on board now? They're really interested in rep to point out, but what can they do to ensure their schools join the wave? Again, it's just it's that being able to generate the enthusiasm um Make it non-threatening Because I think that you know originally you go I can't develop a wiki and then you think I can type I use words so I know it all those icons that they're mean. I know bold. I know this. I know that It's not so hard And this whole idea and I think that Brett you really you know, it was great to say if you make a mistake You can go back and you can undo if you if it just looks terrible you start again There's no cost to you and doing it other than your time Um, you know, it's just so it's getting away from making it threatening It's also taking you know committing to to spending your time learning this So I think that teachers have to understand or or have to come to You know to hopefully they will come to realize that the students Are soon going to overtake take us with education until we get on board and then they have to embrace this Yeah, just a lot of it is not being afraid to make a mistake And that's where the 23 things program is is useful because it's low pressure. It's not during it's not uh Hedagogical activity. It's not you're not involved in teaching. You're not involved with students This is you figuring it out with other teachers So you've got your peers with you and if you make a mistake If you don't understand it if you don't like it, it's not that big a deal For instance, I don't use youtube very much But I use rss. I read 600 blogs on my rss reader So you pick and choose what you like and that's totally okay So you mentioned that if I'm a teacher I wanted to encourage my fellow Colleagues to also embrace web 2.0. You mentioned about the incentivization or the rewards. So can you highlight on this part? Well, they just found that rewarding for success was Was um a good when they implemented this program that it really it really seemed to motivate Individuals now the rewards don't have to be big And you know, we're all adults, which also means that we're all pretty quite competitive usually Sometimes that that type of uh Motivation is good enough. But um, but it's the whole idea too of acknowledging success And that's important now the rewards are fun if that if that works For you, you know, like the first person they To complete three modules gets um a box gets a journal or gets a pizza their class get a pizza Like, you know, you can even get your students involved in this as well Right, I know that certainly that happens in schools all over that the school who who cleans up the most garbage You know, they that class gets a pizza, right? Well, maybe they can push their student They're a teacher on and say you got to get there miss you got to get there miss me about the pizza so it's You know, there's many ways that you could look at the idea of rewards But when they originally put this they found that rewards were important how you define rewards I think would be suitable for what is suitable for your institution um, if I remember correctly the Charlotte and mecklenburg counties they gave out an mp3 player to everyone who completed The 23 things program that they also there was another There was another college that used usb keys with the pre-printed with the name of the program on it so that people would remember So that people had a resource to go back to I mean they just look at their usb key They've got the the url to the website right there. That's that's that's one way that you can do it But the reward shouldn't be What motivates the individual to complete the program because that doesn't work Um, and that is that would be my only caveat in there like rewards are important, but That's if that's the only motivator then the learning won't take place Okay, so you mentioned really interesting things about the child versions of popular social networking sites like facebook So can you mention some of these sites because they're really interesting? Well motion monsters club penguin all of those if you think about it Your child develops or creates even like the fairyland world, you know or something your child creates a character And then they go and they operate in a little Town a village, you know a little microcosm world as this character And they're meeting up with other characters that could be operated by children from all around the world And they're doing things together And they're becoming friends. They're they're actually, you know, like they're gonna be my friend, right? They're friends on mushy monsters. The other monsters are friends, right? So it's Like this is the mini version of of social networking and facebook and and it just has become the norm Now, you know, we don't even think of these games as social networking But this is what they're doing because they can send mail to each other You know, they communicate it's just the baby version I don't know if you want to weigh in on that you might have I I don't know much my little ones are uh three and six months now So I don't really know too much about the a little the little kid version Well, my daughter is uh, going to be nine and certainly being through all of that and and they just keep You know, I mean, I don't know how many times I've had to sign or have started all This this this this, you know, and and it's and it's the latest thing and she'll come home from school and she'll say Everyone's on this. I have to you know, everyone's on this and then she goes and she meets all of her friends And he's all these other people. Yeah And it's just it's natural Yeah, not natural for me because I didn't grow up that way natural So children's way of thinking has has changed. Absolutely and the way children read You know the reading there's difference information knowledge the way that each is gathered in I think skimming Is really big look at sms-ing the texting and all the short forms that are used Not that kids don't don't write properly But there is you know, they understand too. When is it short form facebook? They can use other short forms. When do they need to write properly? Correct. When can they skim read entire texts? It's it's very different. These these children are very sophisticated A lot of studies have shown actually when they look at online gaming and things like this The skills that kids are using and they're they're looking at when they're called the millenniums The skills that are needed at the university level teamwork strategy, you know Collaboration all of these used to be taught a traditional way and now the kids are coming to school with these skills already They've learned it through online game We'll just just think about it. Um before the internet you're sitting there and you're thinking Who is who is the king of england in at the turn of the century? And you sit in your house and you think and you have no way to figure that out unless you get up and you go If you have an encyclopedia in your house or you have to go to the library But now I pull out my phone. I type in who's the king of england I get the answer immediately It's it's a Outer it's a total change in how fast we can get information Almost at the speed of thought Immediately available 24-7 So you mentioned that web 3.0 may be coming so let's see your take on on this term and how would it look like Well web 3.0 is uh, it's it's not a very well accepted term a lot of people are Calling the semantic web web 3.0 the semantic web is tagging Items on the web so videos audio files PDFs all of this with descriptive terms And with data about what this is so Say I have a video on the on the web What's it about? It's about the ICT coder conference. It's It's resolution is this it's topics are this it's uh Excuse me. It has it is this long all of that is encoded Inside the file itself and then using that information Computer systems can recommend To someone else so I'm involved in ICT in Australia And I Go into a website that has the semantic web enabled and what it does. I type in a query for Uh, 23 things and it pulls in all the information Into one place say I'm doing the query on my mobile phone It recognizes that this Piece of the internet isn't going to this pdf file won't appear on my phone, but the video will So it recognizes pulls the video and you can see the video immediately That's the idea of the semantic web Mm-hmm So thank you so much for this exciting a lovely interview and thank you so much again for joining us an ice ski education conference