| Abstract: |
Social Networks are among the most popular achievements of Web 2.0. As a matter of fact, the Internet
is full of social communities like Facebook or Twitter or others, which are used not only by teenagers but
also by older users to share experiences, information and opinions. The expression Social Network allows
for a wide interpretation, coming from the research in social and behavioral sciences. It also lends itself to
encompass a kind of more thematically vertical communities, namely Communities of Practice, where groups
of people interested to learn a particular practice are supported in achieving this goal thanks to the professional
relationships with expert peers. The community network evolves with time, as novice users become experts in
turn, and new communication protocols arise. We start from the consideration that most high school students
nowadays use Web 2.0 instruments and tools for chatting, streaming or posting messages. An interesting
challenge is the possibility for teachers the use of the same instruments and tools to enhance their daily work.
To this aim, we present a first study of a Community of Practice of teachers, involved in Vocational Education
and Training (VET), aiming at learning the use of Web 2.0 tools and applications to support the learning
process of their pupils. In practice, we propose to use Web 2.0 to learn to teach through Web 2.0. As a
platform we used the web application ELGG, that is an open source social network engine thanks to which
we built a social environment where a sample of VET teachers participated to several social activities. A first
evaluation of effectiveness of such an approach is encouraging. |