(1074)ON THE USE OF WEB 2.0 APPLICATIONS FOR HIGHEREDUCATION

摘要

The Bolonia Process sets out a new educational paradigm for the European University in which thelecturer acts as knowledge facilitator, and the student plays an active and autonomous role during thelearning process. Web 2.0 applications are really suitable to give a boost to this new learning process,since they provide a new generation of services that favor knowledge transfer, allowing students tocollaborate and share information online. Moreover, the use of Web 2.0 applications makes possible a“social learning” without space or time barriers, in which collaborative work plays a crucial role.Following this trend, many European Universities are at the moment redefining their traditionaleducational methods in order to fit the demands of a new generation of students who are accustomedto the Web 2.0 two-way information exchange. However, there are still nowadays some factors thathinder the fully integration of Web 2.0 applications in Higher Education and that should beinvestigated.This communication presents an in depth reflection on the current use of Web 2.0 in Higher Educationfor empowering the autonomous and collaborative learning of the students. This reflection is the resultof the work that has been developed at Universitat Politecnica de Valencia (UPV) for the last twoyears by a team of lecturers called GRIPAU (Interdisciplinary Group for University EducationLearning). The main objective of GRIPAU is to favor the integration of Information and CommunicationTechnologies (ICTs) in the education and learning process. In this communication, the use of Web2.0 tools will be investigated in the educational context of UPV. The main opportunities and limitationsof Web 2.0 for Higher Education will be exposed. The different institutional Web 2.0 applicationsavailable at UPV, called PoliformaT, Policonecta, Polimedia and Politube will be described. Differentcase studies developed at UPV using these platforms will be analyzed on the basis of the experienceof GRIPAU. The impact of these case studies will be evaluated by means of different opinion pollsperformed by the teaching staff and the students. The richness of this study is based on thecombination of the different educational experiences in the learning processes inside the sameuniversity. The results obtained can be extrapolated to different educational contexts as results of thegeneral processes employed, that are responsible of the significant long-term learning of commoncompetencies for future professionals. Finally, the main conclusions regarding the usage of thesetechnologies will be presented.