Specific educational practices

The reasons to adopt new technologies are at first educational, in connection with the trainees needs.
So they can have important impacts on the design of the device and on the modalities of supervision. Here are some tips :

Motivation and participation support

Designing trainings needs to plan important fluctuations in interest and participation and to implement measures to arouse and maintain it beyond initial enthusiasm. Tools only are not enough, the purpose or direction given by the pedagogical scenario for their use remains central.

Social media play a motivating role in most educational experiences. They offer an empowerment feeling to trainees and new possibilities of socialization. They advantageously request each trainees perseverance on longer trainings.

Two items related to the motivation of the trainees are often given:

• evaluation of participation : it's more a forced choice to participate than a deliberate one. It is also a risk of a minimal participation aiming only at the infringement of the evaluation's criteria. Contrary to the preconceived ideas according to which the pupils will make only the works which will formally be estimated, the absence of stiff constraints (relative to the blog e.g.) incites the pupils to blog even more. The dosage between constraint and freedom is to be found.
• wide broadcasting of the contributions : opening gives visibility, pride and allows the reuse. It is thus generally seen as a factor of motivation. This practice is systematically used in Animacoop's trainings. The trainees produce diffusable contents. It is a more binding but also more appreciated work. (e.g.: http://animacoop.net/wakka.php?wiki=ContenusProduits).

Individual, collaborative or cooperative paths

The multiplicity of communication tools and the different needs lead to a diverse range of pathways. Then the good teaching position would be to vary in order to give trainees, whom have different learning styles, the possibilities of a more adapted path.

Collaborative activities, facilitated by Web 2.0 tools, have however a particular interest : they are both "a good learning vector" and a mean "to promote the development of social ties between trainees", they allow to "fight against the risk of isolation and demotivation especially in distance learning". They achieve various goals simultaneously:

• accomplishment,
• reasoning of higher level,
• gain of working time,
• transfer of learning,
• motivation for achievement,
• intrinsic and continuous motivation,
• social and cognitive development,
• interpersonal attraction,
• social support, friendships,
• reduction of stereotypes and prejudices,
• valuing differences,
• psychological health, self-esteem,
• social skills,
• internalization of values,
• quality of the learning environment ... and many others.

However the arrival of digital technologies only reveals some hang-up of collaborative learning: sharing critical information efficiently for a joint project is an additional step that many organizations do not take, on one hand by lack of shared culture, and on the other hand because of the basic needs of individuals. The collaborative work is based, primarily, on voluntary service and can not be an obligation.

A more personalized apprenticeship and environment

The culture and the multiplicity of choices given by the Web 2.0, combined to its opportunities of directing the "I", calls for a greater personalization of paths, as indicated above, but also for methods of expression and tools. It can be a very limited personalization : profile and personal pages, photos, etc, added inside an institutional apprenticeship environment, focused on the course or the term rather than on the trainee. But more often, as said in the former chapter, we talk of a more fundamental questioning in which the trainee builds his own apprenticeship environment, from his own choice of tools, independantly from successive institutions that he will spend time in and where he will constitute the portfolio testifying of his training and experience and of his digital identity.

Active educations and more contextualized apprenticeship

More over tools of the Web 2.0 promote an apprenticeship in action, more authentic or more located. The trainee can for example build up resources reusable by the community. E.g. : articles written by Animacoop trainees are reused by trainers for the production of new courses.

Multimedia contents

Another challenge for educators presented by these tools is the trend towards less textual learning resources. Videos in particular encounters a lightning popularity.

• The use of blog : it allows to leave tracks of one's apprenticeships and is excellent in the practices of formative assesment.
• Wiki shows the contributions of each member to a collaborative work.
• Vidéo and video conference enable to assess the spoken expression or the content's appropriation. We can also build on existing content, e.g. evaluate or complete an article on a wiki.

The use of appropriate tools

Placed in front of an abundancey of tools, the trainer must be able to choose the most relevant for the desired apprenticeship. Often, if his institution hasn't done it for him, he also has to select the software to support them. The discussions between trainers on specialized newsgroups show very well their perplexity in front of the multiplicity of offered tools and the difficulty to choose those which will fit best their educational activity.
Farther we propose you a small selection of tools classified according to their uses.

Support

To exceed the level of simple comment or formatting, to progress to a training of higher level, such as the development of argument, criticism and synthesis, a steady veducational support is essential.

The supervision of interactive progresses as those allowed by Web 2.0 asks thus not only more time, but also a steadier availability. To face this greater need for time and for availability, several solutions are proposed.

• the need to establish, from the beginning, slots of availability,
• the collaborative work. The supervision was assumed in team of four trainers : "This way of working favors students who receive instant answers as well as trainers who share the task of answering emails".