This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 11th, 2008 at 5:27 am by Dawn and is filed under XML and learning standards. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
No.
It’d be nice to give you better news, but the right answer is no.
You can’t always rely on user-generated content being good, promoting e-learning, or even being there at all. You can put up a great Web 2.0 tool, like a Wiki, and get nothing out of it but blank web pages.
Getting good, sustained, useful interactivity comes from setting a content baseline, having goals, and facilitating useful communication among users. Your users and employees don’t want to write for its own sake, they want to write to accomplish something.
Are they having a useful conversation or creating a reference they’re going to want to come back and use? Can they relate it to their every day tasks in a way that’s helpful, as opposed to adding extra, unwanted chores? Will they be able to reuse their content elsewhere?
Technology gets you learning tools. Engaged users give you learning communities. I think we all know which is more useful.
It all starts with the people, not the software.
2 Responses to “If I Build It, Will They Come?”
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March 11th, 2008 at 6:07 am
interesting thoughts. I think mass is critical too. we\’ll never get the number of users needed for classical web 2.0 user-generated stuff in even very large classrooms. web 2.0 kind of breaks down at small scales.
March 11th, 2008 at 7:09 am
Spot on. Very few people tend to enjoy writing to the point where they’ll do very much of it, or for very long. Most are content to lurk, maybe one in fifty or a hundred will boldly step out and write in a bare environment, another small handful might follow that one.
Though this dynamic changes, too, when the environment is more private. A small email list might elicit feedback from everyone on it at different times, because the ‘audience’ is known to all the participants. It’s less intimidating than the open Internet, when you don’t know who’s reading.