Investigating Web 2.0 in Education: A Discursive Paradigm for Research

Theo Hug is associate professor of educational sciences at the University of Innsbruck (Austria) and coordinator of the Innsbruck Media Studies research group. He is author and/or editor of several books on various aspects of media, communication, and education (www.hug-web.at). Abstract Recent years have seen the rise of Internet technologies that facilitate activities that are above all social and participatory, allowing children and adults to create and share their own content, and to communicate in a wide range of forums. Correspondingly, there has been great popular and expert interest in the potential of Web 2.0 communication technologies for education. The discursive " spaces " enabled by Web 2.0 differ from conventional face-to-face and online educational environments in that communication largely occurs in written form, and is informal and abbreviated. To understand the potential of these new " conversational " communicative practices and technologies for formal education calls for a new research approach: one that focuses on learning through text-based, informal communication. Such a research approach is provided by discursive psychology, a social psychological paradigm that emerged in the 1990s, and combines the insights of phenomenology, ethnomethodology and conversational analysis. The concern of this approach and of its theoretical precursors " with sense-making " has been observed by educational technologists to make " it a natural framework for undertaking a study of instructional practice " (Koschmann et al. 2007: 134). This paper provides an account of this discursive approach in terms of its relevance to education, and explains how it can be adapted in the study of Web 2.0 technologies in educational contexts.