eLearning 2.0 and new literacies: Are social practices lagging behind?

While the growing prevalence of Web 2.0 in education opens up exciting opportunities for universities to explore expansive, new literacies practices, concomitantly, it presents unique challenges. Many universities are changing from a content delivery paradigm of eLearning 1.0 to a learner-focused paradigm of eLearning 2.0. In this article, we first articulate the paradigmatic differences between eLearning 1.0 and eLearning 2.0 based on technological, social and epistemological dimensions on which we make the case that current social practices of learning in many universities are not keeping up with the possibilities afforded by the Web 2.0 tools. To illustrate our argument, we draw upon our observations of a course in which tertiary students exhibited a traditional, divide- and-conquer disposition while using wikis. There is little in-depth collaboration leading to higher order meaning making or knowledge building among these students. From these observations, we contend that to realize eLearning 2.0, there is a need to change the social-technological infrastructure in universities, and we discuss the various dimensions in which these changes could be implemented.