Not another buzzword like Web 2.0? We hope not, but it is the title of really interesting paper by Derek Keats and J. Philipp Schmidt. The paper is actually focussed on Africa and how it can shape its own future in this new environment, but there is much to apply to other nations too. Essentially they are arguing that the technological changes have wrought cultural changes that “will see a breakdown of most of the boundaries, imposed or otherwise within education, to create a much more free and open system focused on learning.”

Omnium’s Rick Bennett will be giving a keynote building upon their ideas and demonstrating how, in many respects, the Omnium Project is already there, at the ConnectEd 2007 conference.

Whilst batting back and forth the ideas for Rick’s presentation, a thought struck me about the comparisons between institutions and the rise of socially connected online applications (okay then, Web 2.0 - there, I said it).

The real power of ‘Web 2.0′ has been the creation of applications and services that make it much easier to collaborate, communicate, network, etc. The web moved from ’stuff online’ to ’services’. Flickr didn’t set out to create a community, it’s a photo-uploading service through which a community grew. The same is true of MySpace and Facebook (which you should take a look at if you haven’t yet - it has some interesting aspects to it). They’re all applications that then, hopefully, help a community to grow. But without people and enthusiasm they are nothing, which is why this whole idea that you can simply ‘Web 2.0′ any online technology is so stupid. It’s not a magic bullet and it’s not so much about technology as it is about being usable, easy and well-designed. It’s also about people being able to connect and contribute easily, which was always the point of the web.

So what about us as teachers in educational institutions in this Education 3.0 idea? The thing is that we, the teachers and if possible the institution are the application. In some senses it’s a very old and intuitive idea (to some teachers). Get the activities, atmosphere and attitude right - the interface, in other words - and the students and the course run themselves. So the challenge for teachers and institutions is to move themselves from being arcane, opaque structures - a bit like old programming languages, or even HTML - to being something like Blogger or Flickr: open, easy to navigate, flexible and owned by the community. That requires cultural change, not technological ones and the sooner the IT departments wasting investing fortunes on enterprise eLearning systems realise that, the better.