The term Web 2.0 was coined by O'Reilly (2005) and is used to refer to the modern generation of interactive web-based services which allow users to create content themselves and are referred to variously as the social web, user generated web, read-write web, interactive web and so on. In recent years there has been an explosion of Web 2.0 services and the services themselves evolve rapidly to in anticipation of users' demands. Many services have similar functionality which can lead to a baffling level of choice for educators;  helpfully there are some guides to the 'best' tools for learning - for instance  100 Top Tools for Learning, and  'Box of Tricks'.  These challenges, and others, will be described later in this paper.

It is worth noting that some people dislike the term 'Web 2.0' arguing that it signifies more of a paradigm shift than has in fact taken place; phrases such as  'the read write web', or the 'social web' are presented as being more meaningful.  This paper will use the term Web 2.0 quite intentionally at it encompasses the full range of interactive web-based networks, tools, and services which have educational value.

There are many ways of categorising Web 2.0 tools - and many will fall into more than one category.  However the excellent 'Education 2.0' commentary from the UK's Teaching and Learning Research Programme (Selwyn 2008) offers an elegant categorisation of Web 2.0 services.  Selwyn's taxonomy is based on four human dispositions which the different technologies support : expressive (media creation and sharing), reflective (blogging, wikis and social networking),  exploratory (social bookmarking, syndication, folksonomies), and playful (games and virtual worlds).   This paper focuses on the first three of these as they are familiar to most people and are probably more realistic options for the majority of teachers in HE, and adds a fourth - social technologies - to include social networks such as Facebook and MySpace which Selwyn had included within the reflective category; this is because the type of activity within social networking tools is infrequently seriously reflective and is more to do with individuals' identities, their friendships and communities. The common feature of all of these is that they tend to be open to anyone, are often free to use, and content is generally held out there in 'the cloud'.

Expressive technologies

This includes tools for creating, editing, mixing, sharing and re-purposing creative output including videos, audio and animation (e.g. YouTube, Flickr and Slideshare).  As well as providing platforms for free storage and publication of large files the sites include opportunities to control access, to tag content for searching, 'hit counters', and to allow comments, rating and feedback.   They are massively popular with a global user base. Some HEIs may have local video or image databases and services but these will never compete with external services in terms of functionality and range of content.

Reflective technologies

Many people who might have kept a diary or journal in the past are now maintaining one or more blogs.  Unlike the traditional journal, blogs are often intended to be read by a wider audience and many invite comments and feedback.  Blogs tend to be written by an individual even if read by many; in contrast wikis, and other multi-author tools are used for collaborative writing. The use of blogs and wikis in education is relatively well established and supports existing pedagogies of reflective writing (the blog) and teamwork (the wiki); most institutions have their own blogging and wiki services.  

Exploratory technologies

Web 2.0 tools can support research and inquiry in a range of ways including social bookmarking, annotation and reference management services (e.g. Delicious, Diigo, CiteULike), and news feeds (RSS, Atom). 

Social technologies

Social networking services (such as Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn) allow users to build up networks of friends and to share personal and/or professional information with these friends. Individuals may post 'status updates', media, notes and links to their personal spaces ('profiles')- hence Selwyn's categorisation into the reflective category - but the depth of reflection seldom goes much beyond a casual commentary on the day's events.  Twitter - the popular microblogging service in which subscribers post 'tweets' of up to 140 characters in length - is included in this category because of its dependence on having a network of other Twitter users with which to share tweets, but might equally be placed in the exploratory (or indeed the reflective) category.

Any classification scheme for Web 2.0 technologies is open to debate, and there will often be more than one home for a new tool.  Creative output from the expressive technologies may be included in reflective blog posts and wikis, and in social networks;  equally (and hopefully!) much writing in blogs and wikis could be considered expressive; so there is overlap and blurring of boundaries but hopefully Selwyn's (modified) taxonomy presented here will suffice for the purposes of this analysis.

Web 2.0 and education

The educational use of Web 2.0 differs from earlier uses of web technologies which tended to support a tutor-controlled 'broadcast' model of teaching using web pages or delivery of content through a VLE, or which facilitated communication through discussion boards and chat  with access and visibility typically limited to those in a cohort.  Web 2.0 technologies challenge this 'dominant design' (Wilson et al. 2006);  they are 'out there' - available to all.  Indeed one of the practical advantages of using Web 2.0 technologies in education is that they are generally easy to use and are often already familiar to students and staff.  Whether or not the current generation of students really are digital natives who manage information differently from their predecessors as claimed by Prensky (2001) but challenged by Bennett et al (2008) and Bayne and Ross (2009) amongst others, it is undeniable that the majority of young people will have a basic familiarity with Web 2.0 tools, as will growing numbers of their teachers.

In 2003 Garrison and Anderson called for a rethink of pedagogy in order to capitalise on the opportunities offered by e-learning; they pointed out that teaching practice in HE was not fit for purpose for 21st century learners - that there was too much dependence on imparting knowledge rather than on encouraging critical thinking. Mayes and de Freitas (2004) summarise the main learning theories and Crook et al. (2008) present a helpful summary of the ways in which Web 2.0 supports different theoretical frameworks for learning including behaviourism, constructivism, cognitivism, and socio-cultural frameworks:

• Behaviourism focuses on associations between actions and stimuli which affect subsequent actions (for example a teacher providing guidance and encouragement which shapes a learner's next action). Whilst behaviourism no longer dominates educational thinking, some Web 2.0 exchanges lends themselves well to rich social learning interactions or 'intersubjective' dialogues.
• Cognitivism focuses on information processing (involving attention, memory and concept formation), and in particular on the need for reflection and metacognition. Blogs and other journal tools support cognitivist approaches to learning.
• Constructivism involves creation and recreation of knowledge; when such creation takes place through collaborative activities we talk of social constructivism. 
• Socio-cultural theories involve externalising thinking through writing, drawing and other creative activities in social contexts, perhaps scaffolded by the teacher (often with novice and expert working together).

It is clear that Web 2.0 technologies can provide valuable opportunities for this kind of processing and sense-making, co-construction of knowledge and creative collaboration - supporting cognitivist, constructivist and socio-cultural frameworks.  This may be achieved by students working together whether in formal tasks such as co-creation of materials in multimedia or text formats, to less structured activities such as commenting and providing feedback on others' work, to simply sharing resources and ideas - perhaps through Twitter or social bookmarking sites. The 2010 Horizon Report (Johnson et al. 2009) identified the increasingly collaborative nature of students' work as a key driver for technology adoption. The 'communities of inquiry' (Garrison and Anderson 2003) so developed might extend beyond a single cohort of students to involve students and tutors from other institutions, individuals from different disciplines, backgrounds and cultures, and even world authorities on a subject (Crook et al. 2008).  Back in 2003 Garrison and Anderson had noted that whereas the increased learner independence offered by e-learning in terms of time and distance used to be at the expense of opportunities for collaboration with others, e-learning could increasingly support both independent and collaborative learning; communities of inquiry would allow increased discussion of individuals' ideas and experiences.  Garrison and Anderson's book was written relatively early in the evolution of Web 2.0 technologies (indeed before the term had been coined); it seems likely that the range of learning opportunities supported by Web 2.0 is now well beyond what they might have hoped for at the time of writing. As they noted, the key to a quality learning experience will be the way in which the teacher integrates content and context, and e-learning can enhance both. 

Overall Owen et al. (2008) note the potential for 'radical and transformational shifts in education practice' offered by the combination of social software and new educational agendas. However, as Selwyn (2008) and British Library and JISC (2008) highlight, while the adoption of Web 2.0 tools in education may stimulate engagement, they also bring with them the challenge of cultivating learner discernment.  For instance the ability of Web 2.0 to provide new ways to conduct research and keep abreast of relevant information presents new challenges in terms of the students’ information literacies.  The ease of publication to the world without any editorial control means that there are overwhelming quantities of material of dubious quality which students (and teachers) need help in navigating and sifting. They need to develop skills in critical appraisal, and many academics and librarians argue that this ability is lacking.  The report on the Google Generation (British Library and JISC 2008) notes that whilst many young people may have sophisticated technical skills they lack the kind of information literacy possessed by the previous generation of digital immigrants and so are actually less well placed to deal with the mass of information now readily available to them. Students also need to understand that their online activities and profiles are often very openly visible to potential tutors and employers – an individual’s digital footprint can be an important source of information about that individual.  Additionally Web 2.0 may bring with it new requirements for digital literacy – for instance skills in producing and presenting multimedia content (Selwyn 2008); thus there is new scope for creativity in presentation of ideas, arguments, analyses; but there is also the risk that the medium dominates the message.

Ravenscroft (2009) argues that there is a need to better understand the learning-related attributes of the social web; whilst there are common social, communicative and research practices in both learning and social use of the web, one is driven by the need to learn and the other by 'interest' - Ravenscroft et al. (2008) argue that the processes of making meaning differ in learning and social contexts and this is addressed by Clark et al. (2009), Hemmi et al. (2009) and Kerawalla et al. (2009).  A review of 'learning 2.0' by Redecker et al. (2009) concludes that students differ widely in their attitudes to social computing tools - a number of studies (Makri and Kynios 2007, Williams and Jacobs 2004, Burgess 2006) have shown that blogging attitudes and behaviours differ widely within individual cohorts.

Web 2.0 can support a diversity of approaches to assessment especially where reflective or expressive technologies are used, and the opportunities for formative assessment and feedback during a course can assist greatly in checking students' understanding and providing additional guidance where necessary (Hatzipanagos and Warburton, 2009). Redecker et al. (2009) highlight the importance of assessing the learning process as well as the outcome in order to encourage participation in collaborative activities.

Atwell (2007) argues that our education systems are failing to meet the demands of society and employers through the reluctance of institutions and teachers to engage with the social networking technologies which businesses increasingly see as key to knowledge creation and distribution.

Attitudes towards Web 2.0 in HEIs

Some institutions provide Web 2.0 services in-house to support teaching (and research and administrative) purposes - typically there will be an institutional blog and wiki. Access to such systems is often restricted to members of that institution and trusted guests.  This restriction upon access is counter to the Web 2.0 culture of openness, sharing, co-creation and commenting and can be frustrating to some staff and students.  Tutors may wish to invite an external expert, or indeed students from another institution to contribute to a wiki, for instance, which may be difficult or impossible in a restricted environment; students may wish to showcase their creative work and invite comments through a blog.

Other Web 2.0 services which may have educational value have typically not been brought under the institutional umbrella of supported services.  IT departments have a culture of cautious introduction of new services and the pace of introduction and development of Web 2.0 tools far exceeds institutional capabilities to respond.

Traditionally institutions have managed the IT services used in teaching in-house - controlling access, ensuring tight security, drawing up acceptable use policies, monitoring access and uptake; the move towards use of open, flexible, user-focused, rapidly evolving external services is a culture shock for them.   Brian Kelly's presentation at a UCISA CISG meeting argued that institutions have a 'responsibility to engage in innovative activities and explore new ways of furthering their institutional aims'.  The Jadu report (Jadu 2010) reports on survey responses from 44 HEIs on the challenges, application and benefits of social media. Among the top challenges identified were (1) developing the business case for social media - users are convinced but management are not; (2) overcoming cultural issues - including a 'generational' dimension to awareness of the benefits;  and (3) dealing with low levels of restrictions and related implications for privacy, IPR and data protection.

Meanwhile users - both students and their teachers - typically use a range of Web 2.0 services as a matter of course, and educational use of such systems may be taking place under the institutional radar.

Challenges

There are clearly significant educational benefits in the judicious selection and use of Web 2.0 technologies.  However if this is to happen there are a number of challenges, for both teachers and for their institutions, which must be addressed.

Educational challenges

Selwyn (2008) points out the challenging and disruptive influence that Web 2.0 tools can have - for instance challenging notions of authorship, authority and integrity; whilst some academics may welcome this, many will be uncomfortable with this new way of working. 

The rapid pace of change of Web 2.0 services is also challenging in other ways for teachers - any instructions may rapidly become out of date, and services may change so significantly that they no longer support the learning activity the teacher had planned. Further, the sheer number of tools and services means that it can be difficult for teachers to know which to use. Further, many have overlapping functionalities which makes choosing a tool difficult. 

It will clearly take time, and significant staff development and support, to bring Web 2.0 into the mainstream. As Selwyn (2008) and Crook et al. (2008) note, teachers will need to be able to manage and orchestrate collaborative work, and the potentially public exposure of students' creative work and this will place demands on teachers' wisdom and skills of guidance. Redecker (2009) notes the importance of additional planning and scaffolding of collaborative activities by staff.  Additionally staff may need to learn how to use new tools, and to be willing to adjust their roles and encourage students to take more control of their learning and of creation of learning resources. All of this may be quite uncomfortable, especially for the older generations of teachers. Johnson et al. (2009) report that the lack of digital media literacy skills in teachers is a critical challenge and that it is necessary to move away from training staff in how to use tools, which is not sustainable, and instead to help them adopt new ways of thinking and seeing - to become self reliant.

There is a fundamental choice to be made by teachers (and institutions) over whether to use the open Web 2.0 world, or to bring services within their 'walled gardens'. Some teachers will prefer the control and privacy provided within a walled garden; others will want to open their students to wider exposure and to wider communities of practice and so may deliberately choose external services.

Teachers may wish to use social networking technologies with their students whilst avoiding using the same systems that students use in their personal lives such as Facebook and MySpace to avoid blurring of boundaries between education and home life. Some institutions may set up more controlled social networks using services such as Wetpaint or Ning but then discover that students don't actually want to engage within yet another social arena; as Crook et al. (2008) and Owen et al. (2008) note, students may not want to re-create or duplicate their online identities within institutional systems. 

The review of 'learning 2.0' practices by Redecker et al. (2009) concludes that whilst there are many readily available tools for online and collaborative learning, there is a need for a structured approach to their use involving careful selection of tools based on learning objectives, students' prior experiences and attitudes towards social computing, and their preferred interaction patterns.  Web 2.0 tasks need to be 'transparent, relevant and targeted', and support, guidance and assistance needs to be available to those who need it - indeed Redecker et al. argue that the role of the teacher may be more important than ever, encompassing that of designer, coordinator, moderator, mediator and mentor.

Addressing the educational challenges

None of the challenges here is insurmountable; just as with other educational uses of technology such as PowerPoint, course web pages, or the VLE, there are early adopters who will show the way to their colleagues, and there are support teams in most institutions who are there to advise and support those who are unsure of how best to proceed.  Perhaps the most important move an institution can make is to ensure that educational development and e‑learning support staff are conversant with the Web 2.0 world and are able to provide informed advice and support.  These staff will need to help teachers develop confidence in the selection and appropriate use of online technologies, and to become more self-reliant in adapting to inevitable changes in interfaces and functionalities.  They will also be able, hopefully, to encourage teachers to experiment with social constructivist and reflective approaches to teaching and learning which may be new to them - the new technologies may be a something of a Trojan horse for the introduction of (to them) new pedagogies.

Institutional challenges

The fact that many Web 2.0 services are external to – and so outwith the control of – the institution causes institutions concern at a legal or policy level, as noted by the Joint Information Services Committee (JISC 2010).  Further, the collaborative nature of much of the use of Web 2.0 technologies creates issues of ownership and responsibility.  The main issues and risks noted by JISC relate to data protection, copyright, liability issues and accessibility law; to this list may be added usability, audit, availability, reliability of service and of service provider. Every two years the Universities and Colleges Information Services Association (UCISA) conducts a survey of IT managers' top concerns; the 2008 survey results which have only recently been published (UCISA 2009) question what services universities will be required to offer to support digital natives - whether 'to not get in the way (with our firewalls etc.)' is enough, or whether more should be done. They question whether those who want to use Web 2.0 tools are aware of and understand the risks, noting that pioneers typically don't focus on security, audit and legal issues. 

JISC has developed a range of FAQs, toolkits, guides and checklists on the use of Web 2.0 (JISC 2010) which includes documents offering guidance for tutors, IT managers, senior institutional management, learning resources staff and so on. The toolkit for institutional policy-makers sets out to 'clarify where legal risk is likely to be low or absent [... to dispel] the legal mythology which often grows out of uncertainty'.   Whilst JISC have made efforts to minimise the amount of legalese language, and to tailor documents for different groups of users, they do remain rather more off-putting than encouraging to the casual reader.

Addressing the institutional challenges

A summary of each issue and guidance on how each might be addressed is presented in the Appendix; this draws on the excellent guidelines on the use of external Web 2.0 services developed by the University of Edinburgh (2007, 2008) along with the JISC Legal documentation (JISC 2010) and the Web2Rights guidance and toolkits.  

In essence, teachers need to start by asking themselves how important or high stakes are the learning and/or assessment outcomes of an intended Web 2.0 activity.  Depending on the answer, they need to assess the risk presented by that activity in terms of data protection, IPR, copyright, liability, security, audit, and reliability.  The flowchart in figure 1 offers a basic sequence of key questions which staff considering using Web 2.0 tools should consider, and actions they should take depending on the answer to each.

Relating this back to Selwyn’s (modified) taxonomy, the following suggests the broad institutional policy line in for each type of tool.

Reflective technologies

Wikis and blogs are the most popular examples of reflective technologies and most institutions will have institutional services already, either stand-alone or as part of the VLE or e-portfolio.  The use of institutional services is strongly recommended to remove any problems with data protection, security, reliability or availability of service.  Remaining challenges are copyright, IPR (for collaborative work), control and liability, all of which should be addressed by clear institutional guidance on what is and what is not permissible and acceptable, and by take-down policies.  If public exposure or input is required then it should be possible to arrange access by external users; external wikis and blogs should not need to be used.

Expressive technologies

Few institutions have tools which can compete with external services for developing, working with and publishing creative multimedia.  The power, capacity and accessibility of services such as YouTube, Flickr, Picasa, and Slideshare, and the creative potential of other tools (examples include VoiceThread, Scrapblog and Pixton) are attractive to teachers and students alike.  Staff need to examine the terms and conditions of use and avoid services which require users to waive their IPR. Users should be able to self-register, and alternatives should be offered to students who prefer not to sign up to the external service.

For both Reflective and Expressive tools, if student-generated work is to be submitted for assessment there should be consideration of time-stamping of the work, and/or institutional storage of a copy of the submitted work.

Exploratory technologies

Social bookmarking, annotation and reference management services such as Delicious, Diigo, CiteULike and Zotero - and news feeds - offer real added value when compared with traditional localised tools. Since their use will greatly benefit student research and study management, but is unlikely to be required as part of a course nor assessed directly, their use is relatively risk-free.

Social technologies

Students’ general use of social networking is intrinsically personal and informal, free from significant constraints. If teachers wish to make use of social networks in education they will need to be very clear about acceptable content, language, tone, and etiquette.  This would be much easier to manage and control within an institutional system in which any inappropriate content could be taken down by staff. However provision of clear guidance and warnings of in the potential consequences to an individual’s reputation of a ‘soiled’ digital footprint should help to ensure that such systems are used appropriately in an educational context.

In conclusion

It is hoped that this paper has shown how Web 2.0 technologies support constructivist, collaborative and reflective learning and have the potential to broaden the range of pedagogical approaches used in HE. There are undoubtedly new risks involved with some external services, but, as Selwyn (2008) argued, educational institutions need to be 'recast as sites of technological exploration rather than technological restriction'.  The straightforward sequence of questions presented in Figure 1 should help identify areas of risk if high stakes learning and assessment activities are being considered; greater risks may be perfectly acceptable if the learning activity is low stakes – say optional or involves minimal student effort.  This paper agrees with the conclusion of Franklin and van Harmelen (2007) that, given the fact that the use of Web 2.0 is still immature in HE, institutions should take a 'light-weight' approach to regulations which might otherwise stifle experimentation.

Arguably the greater challenges are educational ones;  helping teachers to adjust to new roles so that they can not only design and coordinate meaningful learning activities but also support their students in engaging with those activities; and to help both teachers and students develop improved information and digital literacies to be able to thrive in this new educational world.