This paper will provide an account of how teachers in England use, and see the potential uses of, Web 2.0 technologies. This is an aspect of a larger study, commissioned by the British Educational Technology and Communications Agency (Becta), on behalf of the UK Government. Current interest in Web 2.0 technologies, including such ‘species’ as blogs, wikis and social networking tools, is widely reported. Broadly, we interpret Web 2.0 technologies as affording users opportunities for the publication of user-generated content, and for meeting and interacting with others online. The immediate appeal of such technologies to young people was recently reported by the ‘think tank’ and social research organisation Demos (2007). There are considerable implications for how we think about education and the broader shift from teaching to learning, consistent with some of the aspirations of the UNESCO ‘Delors’ Report (1996). Such implications are also caught up in the sometimes over-heated rhetoric of ‘transformation’ (Fisher, 2006). These implications give rise in the context of the work reported here to such questions as ‘how are teachers and schools actually responding to the wide availability of Web 2.0-type technologies?' and ‘what are the perceived opportunities and obstacles around the educational use of such technologies?’ This paper focuses on the results of the analysis of interviews with teachers as a source of qualitative data from which to provide answers to such questions. The theoretical framework draws on socio-cultural theory in general, and aspects of activity theory in particular. This project represents a significant and timely attempt to investigate, at a national scale, practice, pitfalls and potential around the educational use of Web 2.0 technologies in schools. Through a sophisticated sampling strategy (see below) the project aims to collect rich data from a variety of sources. Here we report on a subset of the data, being that generated from semi-structured interviews with teachers.

The teachers represented in the dataset are drawn from three distinct samples. The first includes teachers from a group of twelve secondary schools affording a representative sampling of secondary school ICT practice. We refer to these as the ‘normative sample’ and these schools provide an indication of the general penetration of Web 2.0 technology for learners and teachers in and out of school. Our history of involvement with the ImpaCT2 project (Becta, 2002) allows us to return to the representative sample of schools originally recruited into that research. The second includes teachers from twelve secondary schools we have identified as broadly innovating in ways that involve Web 2.0 technology. We refer to these as the ‘Web 2.0 sample’ of schools. The third is a group of twelve individual teachers who are innovating with Web 2.0 but at the classroom level – rather than as part of a whole school initiative. We refer to these as ‘Web 2.0 innovators’. A wide variety of data collection methods is being used among these samples, gathering data from students, teachers, senior staff, technical support staff and parents. From among this rich data, we concentrate in this paper on our semi-structured interviews with teachers, which are subjected to qualitative analysis.

The expected outcomes of this research include answers to such questions as ‘how are teachers and schools actually responding to the wide availability of Web 2.0-type technologies?’ and ‘what are the perceived opportunities and obstacles around the educational use of such technologies?' Whilst in this paper our focus is on the teacher interviews, in our research we aim to provide the most authoritative account yet of teacher activity supporting Web2.0 initiatives in the UK, drawing more widely upon the rich data collected as indicated above in the methodology section.