How popular is social networking and the use of Web 2.0 tools like blogs and wikis in Poland?

Dr. Andrzej Wodecki: Learning 2.0 is much more popular among students in secondary and higher education than with teachers. Youngsters do their best to make life easier and more fun. That's why they use social nets like Facebook (in Poland we have something similar at www.nasza-klasa.pl
and grono.pl) or wikipedia.org.

Of course they don't also use these platforms for chatting and talking, but also for education. In many cases, though, this is just gathering educational resources to use in a classroom and has little to do with real learning.

Teachers seem to be rather skeptical and in some sense are afraid of these tools. It may be because they don't know how to use them, or they just don't understand their students. Fortunately, however, we are seeing the interest grow. And last but not least, Web 2.0 helps overcome a common myth about the high costs of eLearning: With lots of content around and easy blog/groupwork tools at hand, teachers can easily create eLearning tools and activities without top-level IT specialists and computer-graphic artists.

Are you convinced that, for example, "Second Life" would be an appropriate environment for teaching?

Dr. Andrzej Wodecki: In some sense, yes. The key point is the word "environment". Our experience shows that SL is poor as a teaching tool. Why? If we look closely at the word "eLearning", we can see that it's not about "teaching" but "learning". Thus we should concentrate on the creation of an appropriate learning environment rather than copy traditional teaching processes.

And what about SL? We've tried many methods and techniques. Many failed, but Second Life was perfect as an environment where students can realize a project, which is understood as a sequence of tasks leading to a final result within a planned budget and timeline. Using Second Life, we've realized various projects, ranging from 3D building construction to mixing real cultural events (Lublin city of Poets) with virtual life.

We didn't concentrate on teaching: students acquired the expected skills just by collaboration with diverse teams, working on tasks within a project framework - and that is nice and efficient.

How would you use this virtual world as a traditional university?

Dr. Andrzej Wodecki: First of all, we established the Polish Virtual University (PUW), which is a joint project of Maria Curie-Sklodowska University in Lublin and the Academy of Humanities and Economics in Lodz. Here we offer study programs and extension courses over the Internet. Our task is to support traditional lectures and trainings as well as to promote modern teaching methods.

Exploring Second Life as a traditional university, I would suggest that people shouldn't mystify virtual reality. Treat it as a useful, almost free, efficient 3D modeling and eLearning tool. Start by engaging the most talented students and forming non-usual, target-oriented, and diverse teams, preferably with no more than five people. Mix SL events with real ones, set a precise target, and don't undertake projects longer than two months. SL is a great way of producing really rich and cheap animation and other educational multimedia. Try this out, and look at this as an authoring environment.

What is the future impact of educational Web 2.0?

Dr. Andrzej Wodecki: Perhaps I'm too old (37) to answer the question about the future; maybe you should ask nine-year-old my daughter! Anyway, in my opinion very soon youngsters will be tired of the increasingly poor quality of internet relationships. They will look for smaller groups of "better" friends, something like Web 3.0.

Then we will have to redefine the role of the teacher: If all the information is freely and easily available, what do we need teachers for? For example, try to search for some keyword using Google's "advanced search" limited to PowerPoint. You get almost all the lectures you want! Of course we need teachers, but their role will change from speaker to shepherd (or leader). We'll see.