Importance of web 2.0- mediated competence for the educational demands on learners

The employment of Web 2.0 within higher educational settings has become increasingly popular. Lectors are starting to explore the potential of blogs, media-sharing services and other social software - which, although not designed specifically for e-learning, can be used to empower students and create exciting new learning opportunities. Reasons for doing so include student motivation, didactic considerations of facilitating individual and collaborative knowledge construction, and the support Web 2.0 gives the learner in transgressing and resituating content and practices between the formal and informal learning settings in which s/he participates. However, introducing Web 2.0-practices into educational settings leads to tensions and challenges in practice because of conceptual tensions between the views of knowledge and learning inherent in Web 2.0-practices and in the educational system: Implicit in Web 2.0-practices is a conception of 'knowledge' as, on the one side, process and activity, i.e. as use, evaluation, transformation and reuse of material, and, on the other, the product side, as a distributed attribute of a whole or community of practice. In contrast, 'knowledge' within the educational system is traditionally viewed as a state possessed by the individual, and learning as the acquisition of this state. This paper is an analysis of the challenges which these tensions lead to for the learners.