Two are better than one
When a crab gets caught into a bucket, it can easily escape, but if there are more than one crab inside the bucket, they will fight against each other rather than cooperate. Finally no one can escape. This is well known as “Crab bucket syndrome,” which will not be a distant phrase for people working on industrial management but it is also commonly used to describe social situation as well as other situations. Under this notion, among the education system especially in Asian countries, we are taught that you are your only friend. We compete with our classmates, other examines, and we work individually. I will not aware of the influence if not being USA.
In western countries, people work cooperatively, and prefer interact with others. Richard J. Light, of the Harvard Graduate school of Education, discovered that students’ success relies on their ability to form or participate in small study groups. (Brown, J. S., & Adler, R. P., 2008) Web 2.0 definitely has certain impact on current status; it changed the role of web users, the information process in our brain, and learning style.
Differentiate from the web in the early age, Web 2.0 provides more free access (ex. Open Educational Resources, OER), more flexibility (ex. Wikis) and ownership (ex, blogs), which shift users’ role from merely consumers to contributors. As Crossman L. (2006) noted in his article “Time’s Person of the Year: You,” there are people who sacrifice their spare time, sitting in front of the screens and create those microcontent to make these small pieces matter. There are more and more students in Taiwan, who post their specialties on-line and seeks for others to exchange their specifies for free. For example, an English major student might exchange with a chemistry major student so that they can learn from each other without even spent a cent.
Everything is changing and there is no way for us to say “No.” Everyone is taking the use of the benefits created by web 2.0. It will be too slow to learn by your own. It’s time for us to contribute, and consume those exploding information.
Resources:
• Brown, J. S., & Adler, R. P. (2008, January/February). Minds on fire: Open education, the long tail, and learning 2.0. EDUCAUSE Review, 43(1), 16-32. Retrieved February 23, 2008, from
• Time Magazine. (2006/2007). Time Magazine Person of the Year, 168(26), December 25, 2006/January 1, 2007.
• Nicholas Carr (2008, July/August). Is Google Making Us Stupid? Atlantic Monthly. Retrieved August 18, 2008, from http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google
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2 comments:
So are you in a bucket in my classes all alone and can jump out at anytime and be free? Or are other people in here pulling you down? Or are other people helping you in your learning bucket? It is interesting, that we used to all be like the lone crab in self-directed learning and then we became a bucket of crabs competing with each other. Now we are not crabs at all I think. Perhaps we are dolphins who share and collaborate with each other and help out humankind. Let's hope! Nice post!
I very much enjoyed your comments regarding the differences in Western learning and what you are used to. I think the collaboration encouraged by Web 2.0 tools will spill over into all other aspects of business and education. Hopefully, more people will start to realize that producing a better product for the greater good is often easier through collaboration, and this is more important that getting the sole credit. Probably an idealistic view, I know.
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