Untangling the Web: Education

It's the first day of school and you're set for a new academic year: you've got all your supplies jammed into your new school rucksack: the pens and notebooks, coloured pencils and stapler, three-ring binders and textbooks.

Now add your laptop or tablet, a wifi connection, a list of usernames and passwords, account details for blogging platforms, social networks, photo sharing sites, cloud-based research resources, collaboration tools and digital 3D learning environments.

That's one heavy bag.

The Web is the ultimate distributed network of information, so how has it transformed the learning process in the last twenty years? For this fortnight's Untangling the Web, I'm dissecting the beating heart of today's education system to discover how people are using the web in classrooms, at home and in libraries, from nursery to university, and whether it's helping or hindering the education process.

It's an enormous topic, with many vested interests. I'll be focussing on pedagogical theories, online education enablers, novel learning techniques and approaches that the web affords rather than focussing on the following themes (which demand their own columns):

- games and learning
- education regulation and policy
- key stages and Internet safety/citizenship
- disinformation
- specific classroom technologies

Reposted from http://www.guardian.co.uk/global/blog/2011/aug/21/untangling-the-web-education-web-uttw-internet-web20

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