This talk will explore how now that informal learning has taken root online and off in what James Paul Gee calls “affinity spaces,” exposing the deep fissures in our factory-model educational system, we have the chance to open up the classroom, making it more equitable and vibrant, grounding it deeply within experience and community.

Scholar-activist bell hooks writes: “Many teachers who do not have difficulty releasing old ideas, embracing new ways of thinking, may still be as resolutely attached to the old ways of practicing teaching as their more conservative colleagues.... Even those of us experimenting with progressive pedagogical practices are afraid to change.”

Indeed, as we explore Web 2.0 practices in our classrooms, have we really understood that we must not only change our tools, but transform our teaching? That we may well have to unlearn how we teach?

Everything is in flux in the Web 2.0 classroom...

*A term from Pierre Levy’s Collective Intelligence