At the heart of knowledge networking, for learning or doing, is the task: a discrete component of knowledgeable action that can be understood in its own terms, and yet always connects with other like or related activities. Tasks are the essential way of making use of Web 2.0 in learning: not vague directions and assumptions about what students should do, but clear and specific tasks that activate cognitive functions
One the key outcomes of our research into the use of Web 2.0 applications at Curtin has been that students prefer, and learn better with, units that are arranged as a set of distinct, clear and integrated tasks to be done. In other words, what we get students to do (as opposed to read, or passively engage with) is the heart of successful learning. This point is well known, drawing both on Biggs’ famous distinction between surface and deep learning, as well as on the work of activity theory scholars, building on Vygotsky. Tasks activate cognitive faculties, whether it is something as simple as writing notes during a lecture or creating some new knowledgeable artefact for online publication. Tasks also split the cognitive load into manageable chunks enabling step-wise development of key skills, the accumulation of knowledge in linked parts, rather than as an impossible whole.
However, tasks make sense now for other reasons aside from just ‘engagement’ of learners. Most students are consciously time-managing their studies with several other commitments and no longer occupy a role of fulltime student which equates to a kind of apprenticeship in the scholarly life of academic research and teaching. Study is fitted in around other key responsibilities (rather like academics now seem to fit research and teaching in around university bureaucracy!). Therefore a task orientation also helps students to work out how to manage their study load: notably, in first-year units we have found that more, shorter tasks works best; in later-year units, of course, less, but more complex tasks are fine. Students learn as much by the way they organise their studies as some magical internal mental process: a task approach, allied to a strong assessment structure, creates the organisation that best suits current conditions. This task orientation fits very well with the way knowledge networking occurs, with the fragmentation and distribution of knowledge work.
The cognitive power of tasks (with aims to be achieved, outcomes to measure against aims, and clear steps between) is made more effective by Web 2.0 applications that work with a learner to create the cognitive engineering. Some programs like quizlet – flashcards – are technically coded to impose structure, forcing users to array information in particular ways; those such as posterous, a blogging engine, are culturally structured (short, regularly updated knowledge production) to achieve a different kind of outcome, but still with structure. Most of the tools described in this site have some element that makes them a ‘cognitive engine’: it does not think for itself, but works with a human user to effect some transition in the form, nature or array of knowledge. These transitions are at the heart of learning: where a Web 2.0 tool makes it easier to do (mind mapping for example with Mind42), then they almost demand inclusion in contemporary education.
Note that tasks lend themselves, in some cases, to a portfolio assignment approach, since many small tasks can be gathered together into a single portfolio, both for ease of marking but also to create explicit coherence in learners’ minds between each task.
The initial research (also conducted with Dr Elaine Tay) on tasks, relating to the unit of study Internet and Everyday Life 102 (see NET102 for more examples), is presented here:
