The Harsh Reality of the Law

The rise of social collaboration technologies, collectively called Web 2.0 (O'Reilly 2005), and corresponding changes in the skills and preferences of students have posed fundamental challenges for institutions and educators. With their ability to engage learners as potential creators and active participants in the learning process, Web 2.0 technologies offer the potential to improve significantly the quality of education. Stephen Downes (2005) describes this combination of collaborative technologies and the pedagogical changes needed to embrace them as "e-Learning 2.0," a term that recognizes that it will take as much reflection and analysis to understand the pedagogical implications of Web 2.0 as it has taken to understand the impact of the Web itself (Alexander 2006; Barnes and Tynan 2007). At the same time, educators face the further challenge of understanding such implications while remaining within the bounds of intellectual property law, which itself is challenged by the new technological capabilities and the move toward collective creation.