Assessment of: The Educator's Guide to the Read/Write Web by Will Richardson

Janice Crawford
iamjlc@gmail.com
10/16/2007

The article, The Educator’s Guide to the Read/Write Web by Will Richardson, highlights, explains and explores the possibilities that some tools of technology present for students, teachers and the global community. Some of these tools are found on what is known as the Read/Write Web. Tools of the Read/Write Web discussed in the article are blogs, wikis, feeds, social bookmarks and podcasts. The author goes on to explain workings of the tools of the Read/Write Web. The author also explores some of the implications, possibilities and opportunities the tools of the Read/Write Web presents.



• Weblogs, wikis, podcasts, and similar tools introduced over the last fews years have ushered in the “Read/Write Web”.

• The Read/Write Web is changing the face of classrooms as thousands of teachers and studentsvbuse the web to publish their work, collaborate on projects, and engage in online conversations.

• One key tool is Weblogs or logs. Which enable anyone to create personal or group Web site without needing to learn hypertext markup language. Tens of millions of bloggers around the world, many of them high school students, regularly add their ideas and perspectives to the massive body of information that is the web.

• Teachers are using blogs to build classroom resource portals and to foster online learning communities. Students create online, reflective, interactive portfolios of their online work to share with worldwide audiences.

• A wiki is a Web site that anyone can edit at any time. The most visible example of the potential of wikis is Wikipedia.org. Each entry is continually shaped by anonymous contributors who log on to the encyclopedia and add new or clarifying information as the need arises.

• Another new digital tool is Really Simple Syndication (RSS) which enables people to subscribe to various feeds of information-data that are continually streamed and collected into a file with the help of a tool called an aggregator.

• RSS aggregators check this information stream as regularly as every hour to see if there is anything new for RSS subscribers to read when they are ready; if there is the aggregator copies and stores it.

• Hundreds of traditional media outlets like The New York Times, Newsweek, and the Wall Street Journal now offer RSS feeds for their content.

• A student doing a project on global warming, for example, can create RSS feeds that will bring him or her the latest research on the topic almost as soon as it is published.

• Another way to share information on the Web is podcasting, which can best be described as creating amateur home radio programs widely distributing them on the web.

• Now that anyone with an internet connection can publish and disseminate content with no editorial review process, consumers of Web content need to be editors as well as readers. We need to teach students how to actively question and evaluate published information instead of passively accepting it as legitimate.

• The old read-only Web was itself a transformative technology that changed the way our students work, learn and communicate. The new Read/Write Web will change their lives even more.



As an educator, we need to consider whether our curriculums should change now that students have the ability to reach audiences far beyond our classroom walls. This also may motivate students to become better editors and more thoughtful producers of works that they may in the past have handed in to the teacher alone, but now may be visible by a global audience. We must teach students how to actively question and evaluate published information instead of passively accepting it as legitimate. The teacher’s role may also shift from a content expert to a guide who shows students how to find and evaluate online resources, communicate with experts whom they encounter online, and publish their own creations. Teachers using these tools of the Web to enhance instruction must monitor student use and teach students how to use the tools safely as well as show students how to deal with inappropriate content. The Web creates risks as well as opportunities for the classroom. Schools and educators need to create clear rules and limitations for the utilization of such tools so the educators and students rights are protected.