Learning 2.0 in Higher Education. What pathways should academia take now?.

New media have become an essential part of everyday life and regular users are labeled as ‘(inter)net generation’ (Tapscott, 1998; Buckingham, 2007; Montgomery, 2007; Beetham & Sharpe, 2007) or ‘digital natives’ (Prensky, 2001, 2009, 2010; Benett et al., 2008; Helsper et al., 2010). Interactive new media (Manovich, 2003; Crook, 2008; Redecker et al., 2009) and the social web (Bevan, 2010) are blurring the boundaries between learning and social or leisure activities. By transforming conventional media monologues into social media dialogues, they are expanding opportunities of collaborative authoring and peer exchange within communities of prod-users (Bruns, 2008; Rheingold, 2008). They generate a high growth of social interactions and mutual exchanges among members (Ito et al., 2009; Kirschner & Karpinski, 2010; Eynon & Malmberg, 2011). Participants feel some degree of social connection with one another, mutually value contributions and support less competent members through tutoring practices. On the basis of this “participatory culture” (Jenkins et al., 2007) radical new learning opportunities (Ala-Mutka, 2010) take shape. The participatory and active role, which these tools allow users to take, make them interesting for learner-centred approaches in higher education. The regular use of ICT and web technologies (Anderson, 2007) in educational institutions is far from common and rarely goes beyond rudimentary functions or the use of limited resources (Cox et al., 2003a, 2003b; Cuban, 2003).
The present contribution discusses results achieved by students using web 2.0 applications within academic programs such as blogs, video sharing tools and social net working sites. They evidence beneficial effects on processes of learning, socialisation and conviviality (Caire 2010) and skills such as critical thinking, problem solving, communication, and collaboration as emphasised by 21st century frameworks (Voogt & Pareja Roblin, 2012) .
Furthermore, the contribution will raise questions about barriers and strategies for integrating learning 2.0 effectively into higher educational contexts. It emphasises the systemic tensions to overcome, pedagogical practices to promote and conviviality potentials (Caire, 2010) to stimulate by fair digital participations, collaborations and interactions in highly multilingual and multicultural contexts.