Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Editorial

2011; Athabasca University Press; Volume: 12; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.19173/irrodl.v12i3.994

1492-3831

George Siemens, Gráinne Conole,

New technologies that influence how information is created and shared and how people connect and socialize hold promise for adoption in education.Much like the idea of a book necessitated the development of the library or the idea of structured curriculum and domains of knowledge produced classrooms, the idea of the Internet -distributed, social, networked -influences the structure of education, teaching, and learning.Educators and researchers face a challenge in determining how the existing education system will be influenced and the new roles that will be expected of learners, teachers, and administrators.Information-centric fields such as journalism have struggled with the new democracy of information creation for over a decade.The music industry continues to grapple with access issues and the "unbundling of the album" initiated by Napster and firmly entrenched by iTunes.Telephone companies face an uncertain future as Skype, Google Voice, and other web-based communication services increase in popularity.Essentially, the Internet has remade how society creates and shares content and how people communicate and interact.The implications for education are significant.Educators have explored the role of the Internet as a research and learning tool for several decades.In the late 1990s, social network services (e.g., Friendster) and easy publishing tools (such as blogs) increased the ability for anyone with an Internet connection to both publish and engage in online conversations.Since that time, we've experienced a decade of amazing innovation in social networking sites (Facebook, Twitter), in openness movements (open source, open access), in mobile technologies (mobile phones, iPads), in the growth of broadband, in gaming, in multimedia (YouTube, podcasts), and in new tools that blend the physical and virtual worlds (location-based services such as Foursquare and Groupon, augmented reality, "internet of things").