This week I attended an online conference, Clouds on the Horizon, devoted to the subject of cloud computing for online teaching and learning. If you are unfamiliar with the concept of cloud computing, Common Craft has recently produced a new video on the topic for their Plain English series.

Thanks to cloud computing, online learners have a wide variety of web 2.0 tools they can use to learn, create, collaborate, and share their work with others. This often goes beyond the limitations of learning management systems, because learning is extended beyond the traditional scope of the classroom: they can use media not supported by the learning management system, work faster or slower than the average course schedule, and interact with an audience much larger than any course could support.

This raises a question about the way we are thinking education: are universities still serving students in this era to take advantage of changes to the educational matrix? Alan Collins and Richard Halverson, in a lecture last month at the University of Illinois, argued that schools are fighting a losing battle because of incompatibilities between the educational system as it was designed in the 1800s and today’s technology:  people are taking education out of schools and using online resources and forums to advance their passions and career goals (Rethinking Education in the Age of Technology). In other words, students can often learn more, and faster, from participating in web forums with an international community of career professionals than they have been learning from one instructor at their school.

We are currently living in an age when our sociocultural network is changing and adapting, not just because people are using the internet but because of the way they are using the internet. Anyone and everyone is potentially an audience and a collaborator. Knowledge is being shared faster with the entire world as its audience. Traditional online courses, however, are restricted to a small number of people who are paying to learn from one instructor behind a password-protected wall. Open-source education, on the other hand, advocates sharing information with all the world. One of the concepts Curtis Bonk hammers out in The World is Open is that when education is made available to everyone, “WE-ALL-LEARN” (Bonk).

This can sound terrifically inspiring (and as I write about it for a publicly viewable blog in “the cloud”). Coming down from the cloud, however, one might wonder how so much free knowledge can maintain its educational integrity and, simultaneously, financial sustainability. What about the instructors who have been sharing their knowledge for a living, or anyone else employed by a university, for that matter?

Richard Katz, VP of Educause, argued in his keynote presentation for Clouds on the Horizon that universities can’t completely advocate learning entirely from the cloud because there is too much “truthiness” masquerading as factual information; the wider audience of web 2.0, in other words, makes it harder for students to separate sources with academic integrity from just anyone who feels like writing whatever and posting it online.

How, then, can instructors best make use of cloud computing? By all means, it can’t be a bad idea for instructors to make use of web 2.0 resources when they can help students learn the course topic and prepare for their lives beyond the classroom. And, as most of them are already using many of these technologies, their use in online teaching can help increase communication and participation among those students. One of the other points Katz stressed in his keynote, however, is that instructors should not “confuse a tool with a goal”: i.e., getting students to use technology is not the same as getting them to learn with technology; exercises still need to be structured around solid pedagogical concepts and learning objectives.

The relationship between cloud computing and education remains an issue that may need to be considered over time as technology continues to grow and evolve. As online instructors, are we making the best use of the technology at our disposal, and is it helping our students prepare for their futures as well as we could hope? How does it compare with any learning (or erroneous learning) they may be picking up outside of class from other web 2.0 sources? Will universities need to change the way we present and teach information, and if so, how?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/librarianbyday/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

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