Superb Writing about Web 2.0 and Learning and Teaching
This morning I found the best piece I’ve read on Web 2.0 and teaching and learning.
http://www.educause.edu/apps/er/erm06/erm0621.asp
It is by Bryan Alexander and is published in the March/April issue of the Educause Review. I highly recommend adding this to the pre-reading for the boot camp.
On delicious and learning:
Pedagogical applications stem from their affordance of collaborative information discovery. For instance, researchers at all levels (students, faculty, staff) can quickly set up a social bookmarking page for their personal and/or professional inquiries. The Penntags project at the University of Pennsylvania (http://tags.library.upenn.edu/) and Harvard’s H2O (http://h2obeta.law.harvard.edu/home.do) are examples. First, they act as an “outboard memory,” a location to store links that might be lost to time, scattered across different browser bookmark settings, or distributed in e-mails, printouts, and Web links. Second, finding people with related interests can magnify one’s work by learning from others or by leading to new collaborations. Third, the practice of user-created tagging can offer new perspectives on one’s research, as clusters of tags reveal patterns (or absences) not immediately visible by examining one of several URLs. Fourth, the ability to create multi-authored bookmark pages can be useful for team projects, as each member can upload resources discovered, no matter their location or timing. Tagging can then surface individual perspectives within the collective. Fifth, following a bookmark site gives insights into the owner’s (or owners’) research, which could play well in a classroom setting as an instructor tracks students’ progress. Students, in turn, can learn from their professor’s discoveries.
On search, blogs, linking:
Web 2.0 therefore supports queries for information and reflections on current events of all sorts. Given bloggers’ propensity for linking, not to mention some services’ ability to search links, blogs and other platforms readily lead the searcher to further sources. Students can search the blogosphere for political commentary, current cultural items, public developments in science, business news, and so on.
The ability to save and share a search, and in the case of PubSub, to literally search the future, lets students and faculty follow a search over time, perhaps across a span of weeks in a semester. As the live content changes, tools like Waypath’s topic stream, BlogPulse’s trend visualizations, or DayPop’s word generator let a student analyze how a story, topic, idea, or discussion changes over time. Furthermore, the social nature of these tools means that collaboration between classes, departments, campuses, or regions is easily supported. One could imagine faculty and students across the United States following, for example, the career of an Islamic feminist or the outcome of a genomic patent and discussing the issue through these and other Web 2.0 tools. Such a collaboration could, in turn, be discovered, followed, and perhaps joined by students and faculty around the world. Extending the image, one can imagine such a social research object becoming a learning object or an alternative to courseware.
The notes are a superb bibliography:
. Tim O’Reilly, “What Is Web 2.0,” September 30, 2005, tim.oreilly.com, <http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html>.
2. Stephen O’Hear, “Seconds Out, Round Two,” The Guardian, November 15, 2005, <http://education.guardian.co.uk/elearning/story/0,10577,1642281,00.html>.
3. See <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AJAX>. See also Janice Fraser, “It’s a Whole New Internet,” Adaptive Path, April 21, 2005, <http://www.adaptivepath.com/publications/essays/archives/000430.php>.
4. Arnaud Leene, “Web 2.0 Checklist 2.0,” MicroContent Musings, July 21, 2005, <http://www.sivas.com/microcontent/musings/blog/web_20_checklist_20/>.
5. For examples, see the following: the BBC “What People Are Saying in England” display, <http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/england/TSP>; Casey Bisson’s library experiment, <http://www.plymouth.edu/library/prototype/clusteredopac.php?srchtype=X&k=sociology+of+education>; a Washington Post headline cloud, <http://www.revsys.com/newscloud/>; or TagCloud.com’s samples, <http://www.tagcloud.com/index.php>.
6. Clay Shirky, “Ontology Is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags,” Clay Shirky’s Writings about the Internet, <http://www.shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html>.
7. Noted first by Hans Kullin in his Media Culpa blog, <http://www.kullin.net/arkiv/2006_02_01_mc.html#113999533755894760>.
8. See also EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative, “Seven Things You Should Know about Social Bookmarking,” May 2005, <http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELI7001.pdf>.
9. A good survey from early 2005 is Tony Hammond, Timo Hannay, Ben Lund, and Joanna Scott, “Social Bookmarking Tools: A General Review,” D-Lib Magazine, vol. 11, no. 4 (April 2005), <http://www.dlib.org/dlib/april05/hammond/04hammond.html>.
10. Usenet discussions from 1981 on are archived at <http://groups.google.com/>.
11. Brian Lamb, “Wide Open Spaces: Wikis, Ready or Not,” EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 39, no. 5 (September/October 2004): 36–48, <http://www.educause.edu/pub/er/erm04/erm0452.asp>.
12. Laura Blankenship, at Bryn Mawr College, discovered and tested this out:
<http://www.brynmawr.edu/etc/etcblog/2005/09/word-processing-on-web.html>.
13. One of the best surveys to date is “For the Vox Populi: A Comparison of How Some Blog Aggregation and RSS Search Tools Work,” post by Mary Hodder on Napsterization.org, July 24, 2005, <http://napsterization.org/stories/archives/000500.html>.
14. See Dan Gillmor’s excellent We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People (Sebastopol, Calif.: O’Reilly Media, 2004) for background: <http://wethemedia.oreilly.com/>.
15. “MobileGlu Brings Web Content to Cell Phones,” Engadget Mobile, February 20, 2006, <http://www.engadgetmobile.com/2006/02/20/mobileglu-brings-web-content-to-cellphones/>.
16. Cory Doctorow, “Does Web 2.0=AOL 1.0?,” presentation at the Web 2.0 Conference, October 7, 2004, San Francisco, California, <http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail321.html>.
17. “Japan Newspaper Wins Damages for Online Use of Headlines,” October 6, 2005, TODAYonline.com, <http://www.todayonline.com/articles/76678.asp>.
18. See Top Ten Sources, <http://www.toptensources.com/toptensources/home.aspx>, and discussion at MetaFilter, January 2006, <http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/48389>.
19. Lawrence Lessig, The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World (New York: Random House, 2001); J. D. Lasica, Darknet: Hollywood’s War against the Digital Generation (Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley, 2005).
20. Barbara Ganley, “More Thoughts on Teaching and Learning: Lessons Learned,” bgblogging, Middlebury College, December 14, 2005, <http://mt.middlebury.edu/middblogs/ganley/bgblogging/010545.html>.
21. Stephen Downes, “E-learning 2.0,” eLearnMagazine, October 17, 2005,
<http://www.elearnmag.org/subpage.cfm?section=articles&article=29-1>.
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