UNIVERSITIES AND WEB 2.0:
INSTITUTIONAL CHALLENGES
Juan Freire
Universidad de A Coruña
http://juanfreire.net/
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL SEMINAR
Web 2.0 and education. 17-19 October 2007

1.The promises and reality of web 2.0
3. What is web 2.0? Beyond
technology
5. Bottlenecks for institutional
adoption
7. Institutional fears
9. Elements for a strategy of web 2.0
adoption in universities

1.
THE PROMISES AND
REALITY OF WEB 2.0

WE NEED A CHANGE IN
LEARNING PARADIGMS
Teacher - centered Learning networks
Active students
Hierarchical
Teachers as facilitators

WHY
• European Space for Higher Education
• Contemporary social needs and requirements
Focus in
• innovation
• creativity
• entrepreneurship
HOW. WEB 2.0?
• Learning by doing
• Collaborative and active learning

BUT …
• Web 2.0 is real in universities. Lead users
(employees and students) using it independently
• No scaling
• Web 2.0 is not real at the institutional
level
• Widening of the “digital divide” among
persons and with their organizations

2.
WHAT IS WEB 2.0?
BEYOND TECHNOLOGY

TECHNOLOGY: WEB 2.0 TOOLS
1. Blogs
2. Wikis
3. Audiovisual content, presentations: Fickr,
Youtube, Slideshare
4. Microblogging, IM (?): Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce
5. Social networks: Facebook, MySpace …
6. Tagging and managing references (links):
del.icio.us, Furl, CiteULike …
7. Especialized searching engines: Technorati,
Blogsearch …
8. Agreggators and feeds readers: Google
Reader, Netvibes, Bloglines …
9. …

LOOSELY-COUPLED SYSTEM OF
INTERNET APPLICATIONS
http://www.internality.com/web20/

CHARACTERISTICS
• Open source. Open APIs
• Tool integration. Mashups
• Free or low cost
• Easy learning
• Easily adapted to specific needs
• Users do not need to be geeks

WEB 2.0 ECOSYSTEM FOR LEARNING
LOOSE
e-Mail (?) COUPLING
FEEDS AGGREGATORS (RSS)
IM
Conversations
Blogs FEEDBACK
Community
FOLKSONOMIES
management
Analitics social
Collectibve blogs
Aggregators
networks
Technorati
Wikis
Persons
Del.icio.us
nt
te
on
Flickr, Youtube, Slideshare
C

“TROYAN HORSE” FOR A NEW
SOCIAL AND CULTURAL PARADIGM
Technologies for social creation of
knowledge

VIDEO

VIDEO

Tools 2.0
Web 2.0
Social
networks

1. TECHNOLOGY
• From “push” to “pull”
• From portals to personal aggregators
and searching engines

THE OLD DIGITAL ORDER
Yahoo! 1997

THE NEW DIGITAL (DIS)ORDER
Netvibes Universes 2007

2. KNOWLEDGE
• from copyright to open
access and content remix
Origins
• Free software
• Scientific communities, …
Open knowledge
• Independent (“free speech”)
• Low or 0 cost (“free beer”)
• Modular
• Generative

3. USERS
• the revenge of amateurs
• from consumers to creators and
curators
• social networks

HOW TO NAVIGATE THE
EXUBERANCE OF INFORMATION
CONVENTIONAL, 1.0, APPROACH
• External authorities. Hierarchies
• External filters to offer contents to consumers
WEB 1.5
• New filters and authorities (collective and/or
imposed): Wikipedia model
WEB 2.0
• Build personalized filters: Technology 2.0 +
Educated users (third culture, freedom, responsability)

New roles for teachers
• Coaches and mentors of students
• Facilitators for learning
• Media and tool design
• Virtual tuition
• Examiners and advisers
New roles for students
• Active learning
• Collaboration among them and with
teachers
• Team work

3.
BOTTLENECKS FOR
INSTITUTIONAL ADOPTION

• Rejection by the users
• Lack of an incentive system or
perverse effects
• Available pre-web 2.0 technology
• Culture of aversion to innovation and
enterpreneurship

REJECTION BY USERS
The case of the “open review trial” by
Nature

HOW TO CHANGE THE OPPOSTION
OF USERS
• Introduce and expand a new knowledge
culture (strange to ”conventional” students and
teachers)
• Digital natives are entering the campuses.
Opportunity or widening the divide?

REQUISITES FOR A COLLABORATIVE
ORGANIZATION
Technological
ORGANIZATION
DANGER!!
HIGH 2.0
abilties
LOW START WITH
LOW POTENTIAL LEAD USERS
LOW HIGH
Collaborative culture
http://artesaniaenred.blogspot.com/

AVAILABLE PRE-WEB 2.0 TECHNOLOGY

BOTTLENECKS
• 1980, 90s. Large investments in
infrastructure and software
• Distrust of free software and open source
• Web 2.0 available almost for free
• Need of a shift of efforts to integration and
adaptation to the users needs: MASHUPS

4.
INSTITUTIONAL FEARS
OF WEB 2.0

ULTIMATE CAUSES
3. Difficulties to assume the criticism of the
traditional model of education and
knowledge production
5. Control and power of IT departments

RISKS PERCEIVED BY ORGANIZATIONS
• reliability
• security
• governance
• compliance
• privacy
Uncontrolled use of web 2.0: “unsanctioned
employee usage”
Web 2.0 policies and usage guidelines?
Reduction of user innovation

TRUST VS. OPENNESS
Competing needs:
5. Visibility
6. Security and trust

SOCIAL NETWORK TOOLS AS A
SOLUTION?
THE “FACEBOOK APPROACH”

CONTENT:
Integration of third party
web 2.0 tools
http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/10/facebook_long_tail_report.html

USERS: individual
monitoring, group work
PEOPLE
t
en
em t
ag in
an Jo
m
CONTENT

TRUST VS. OPENNESS IN
INFRAESTRUCTURES
3. Closed network for critical, 1.0, processes
4. Open network for web 2.0 usage

5.
ELEMENTS FOR A STRATEGY
OF WEB 2.0 ADOPTION IN
UNIVERSITIES

0.
OBJETIVES AND STRATEGY
PROMOTED BY MANAGERS,
especially those related to knowledge and
people management
Requires radical cultural changes

1.
LEARNING FROM PREVIOUS AND
ON-GOING EXPERIENCES
• Lead users inside the organization
• Other organizations adopting web 2.0 and
open paradigms

THE VALUE OF LEAD USERS
C. Let the community (teachers, students) to
explore and adapt tools
E. Learning by “data mining“ these
experiences
G. Integration of successful
experiences, tools and practices

Organizations: Universities

Organizations: Universities

Organizations: Universities

Organizations: Universities

Organizations:
Research institutions

Organizations:
Research institutions

2.
OPEN ACCESS AND USE OF
CONTENTS
Knowledge:
• Digital
• Modular
• Flexible licenses (use and distribution)
Technological (i.e. databases, XHTML)
and social (i.e. tagging) standards
• search engines
• aggregators

FLEXIBLE LICENSES

3.
ORGANIZATIONS AS OPEN
PLATFORMS FOR KNOWLEDGE
CREATION AND SHARING
Learning from experiences in
business management
• Open innovation
• User innovation
• Crowdsourcing
•…

EVOLUTION TO BUSINESS 2.0
1. From hierarchical and closed structures
To distributed and open platforms
2. From marketing
To conversations (external)
3. From knowledge management,
technolgoy surveillance, prospective ...
To conversations, networks and
communities

THE GROWING IMPORTANCE
OF OPEN INNOVATION

Advantages of open platforms
respect to closed organizations
• Lowering costs: Crowdsourcing
• Accelerating innovation and knowledge
creation
• Increasing creativity

New threats (and opportunities)
• How to manage intellectual property?
• How to compete being open?
• How to manage human resources?
• What about research?