Commercialization of Web 2.0 in Education

October 5, 2008 in Technology, open source | No comments

Commercial interests have insinuated themselves into schools in many ways over the past several years: news programs aimed at students with advertising, sweetheart soft drink deals offering kickbacks to school districts. The list is endless. The newest manifestation of this trend is the offer of free web 2.0 tools for students and educators by a number of companies including Google.

Commercial interests have a profit motive in offering these “free” services to schools–otherwise they wouldn’t do so. If they do not charge for these services, how to they plan to finance or monetize these services? There are a number of ways.

First, there is advertising. Many of these free sites include advertising on their pages targeting the demographic of the typical reader. Worse yet, sometimes it includes advertising that is inappropriate for the educational setting. You have no control over what appears. To their credit, some sites offer advertising free access. That means, however, that they must be finding other ways to make it profitable.

Marketers highly value any information regarding the behaviors and patterns of school age children.  Aggregated data on Internet usage of children this age is extremely valuable and where better to find this data than our schools? By directing students to use these commercial tools, we are delivering a treasure trove of data to these companies. Brand loyalties also begin to form at these ages.This is why Coke and Pepsi were so willing to offer schools lucrative kickbacks for offering only their brands in school vending machines before there was a backlash.

Additionally, many Internet services have in the past started as free only to change to for pay models down the line once one has grown accustomed to the service. Those of us who have been on the Internet a long time has seen numerous such instances.

Another peril is data ownership. What many users to not realize is that hidden deep in the text of many Terms of Service is language which passes ownership of the content from the user to the company. Others simply have users unknowingly relinquish their materials to the public domain. Releasing content to the public domain can be a good thing, but individuals should understand that they are doing so.

Many Web 2.0 evangelists tout these tools on the websites, in their books, and at conferences. Cash strapped schools and teachers latch onto them without a second thought. In essence, much of the Web 2.0 movement is telling students to march lock stepped into the hands of these commercial interests. We are teaching acquiescence to big business.

I believe it is one thing to mention these tools to students and examining the terms of service while they do so. What I have seen however, is teachers blithely instructing students to register accounts on Blogger, or some other web service as a matter of fulfilling course requirements. I don’t think that we have the right to do this.

There are alternatives. Free and open source software alternatives exist for almost every web 2.0 tool. While they must be hosted on a server, such can be done very inexpensively on existing school infrastructure, or by renting servers or space on servers for little money. Last year, our school ran several such tools on rented server space for about $10 a month. I believe that we as schools and educators have a moral imperative to move in this direction. I discussed this in an earlier post as well.

Many of my previous posts have centered on open source Web 2.0 tools and their deployment in education. Future blog posts will continue to seek out the tools as an alternative to the commercialization of Web 2.0 in education.

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