January 3, 2011 by mguhlin

MyNotes - Affecting the Intent to Adopt Web 2.0 Services

The following are my notes from Nam (Sogang University) Cheon, Song, and Jones’ (Texas Tech University) article in the Journal of Digital Learning in Teacher Education, Volume 27, Issue 2 (Winter 2010-2011) entitled Influencing Preservice Teachers’ Intention to Adopt Web 2.0 Services.

My Notes:

The study investigates preservice teachers’ intention to adopt Web 2.0 services in their future classrooms.
Findings indicate that the reinforcement of salient beliefs, such as ease of use, usefulness, and facilitation, will enhance preservice teachers’ intention to adopt new technologies.
Web 2.0…enables users to produce and share information with other people through a variety of services such as social networking sites, blogs, wikis, media sharing sites, and other interactive conferencing sites.
They offer various student-centered learning activities.
Inservice teachers’ positive attitudes toward technology and beliefs in their own capacity to work with technology affect their actual use of technology in teaching and learning.
Technical support, computer access, organizational support, and professional development are also listed among the factors affecting teacher usage of technology.
Eight types of Web 2.0 applications—none of which require high technical skills for web publications—are listed:
blogs - personal web publishing tool.
wikis - a collaborative editing tool for interlinked webpages.
social bookmarking - store and share bookmarks as well as annotations and tags and commonly has a feature for tagging clouds to enable virtualization of the usage of tags.
social networking - uses web as communication medium through which users interact with others.
collaborative editing tools - facilitate users’ creation of collaborative works on documents, spreadsheets, and presentations.
media-sharing services - provide web spaces for users to share the multimedia they have created.
syndication technologies (RSS) - aggregates news and messages from diverse websites.
mashups - combines multiple data or functionalities from other websites to enrich or customize a webpage, allowing users to collect and repurpose their own portals to display these tools
3 P’s proposed by McLoughlin and Lee (2008):
Participation with students’ own perspectives
Personalization with students’ convenient time and place
Productivity by student-generated products
As social constructivism posits that knowledge is created by learners as a result of social interaction, social networking applications and collaborative tools could enhance interaction with others as well as creativity by providing a platform for the co-production works.
The cognitivist learning environment is supported by the easy learning curve of Web 2.0 services.
The availability of multiple sources of information produced by others (e.g. text presentation, video clips or audio narrations) could enhance knowledge transfer; enhancing working memory with multiple resources is the key consideration of cognitivism.
The advantages of learning with Web 2.0 can be summarized as follows:
Promotes student-centered learning such as horizontal (peer-to-peer) learning
Increases creativity during reasoning and problem solving
Enhances interaction for collaborative knowledge building
Creates a rich, engaging and exciting learning environment
Engages in communities for professional growth and leadership
3 affordances of web 2.0 in the classroom:
low threshold applications
a variety of tools and models
low cost and networked community
Many educational reforms failed because they had little impact on teachers’ beliefs or practices.
Teacher level factors included attitude, technical skills, self-efficacy, and perceived usefulness.
Environmental factors included technical support, computer access, administrative support, incentives to change, peer use, and subjective norm.
Two types of belief:
Educational belief are the individual conceptions about desirable ways of teaching and conceptions about how students come to learn.
Technological belief consists of teachers’ attitudes and beliefs about the importance of technology use in teaching.
Implications of the study:
regarding ease of use, preservice teachers should be exposed to a wide variety of technologies so that they can acquire a higher level of familiarity. For example, Picasa or GIMP could be alternatives to more complex advanced graphic software (such as Adobe Photoshop).
To increase preservice teachers’ perception of usefulness, rich hands-on activities with technology along with examples for potential use should be included, not only in technology integration courses, but also in other teacher education courses.
Teacher educators could provide more general types of facilitation…a directory of Web 2.0 services would be a useful resources. A repository of tech integration lesson plans using Web 2.0 services would be valuable.
The positive beliefs of teacher educators is prerequisite. The offering of regular workshops or training for these educators would be catalysts for the pedagogical approaches using Web 2.0 services.
Current approaches for technology application courses are tool-dependent and focus on how to use technology…the new paradigm of teacher education should be learning dependent and emphasize how to learn with technology.
The teaching profession requires new teachers to have positive beliefs about technology and skills to adopt technology in a wide variety of ways.

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Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin’s blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure