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Permalink Reply by CUE on February 19, 2008 at 2:07pm

We need to decide what topics we are going to try and address in this session, and are looking for feedback here.

We also want to find ways to model "Web 2.0" or collaborative techniques to involve the audience beyond just Q&A at the end. For sure we will post a back-channel chat window for real-time comments. What else would anyone like to see us do?

Steve

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Permalink Reply by CUE on February 19, 2008 at 2:08pm

Here's the original, longer proposal for this panel discussion, written by Sylvia Martinez.

Steve

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Schools and educational institutions are finding significant practical applications for the tools of Web 2.0, but the hurdles to adoption are as large as the potential for change (and possibly directly correlated). There are significant practical challenges to overcome--security, filtering, and comfort with and appropriateness of openness--but there is a great potential for a dramatic rethinking of the role of formal institutions in teaching and learning.

The promise of Web 2.0 technologies is so great that almost all of the basic types of online collaborative software are being used by teachers somewhere, whose own use of the tools is minimizing their sense of isolation and creating a strong communities of practice and professional development. But while these tools open new vistas of collaborative learning, distance education, differentiated or individualized instruction, and proactive educational paths, they also inherently challenge our culturally entrenched and traditional learning structures.

Blogs have been the primary entry point of Web 2.0 into education, but educators in growing numbers are also now engaging students by using wikis, podcasting, collaborative documents, social networking, social bookmarking, photo- and video-sharing, and other tools of user-generated content. In many (but not all) cases, students are coming to school with a broad familiarity with these technologies, but not necessarily with the depth of understanding to use them thoughtfully or carefully. Do they park these skills at the door before coming into the classroom, or can schools help students to learn to use them in productive educational ways? Can we afford to have enough computing technology in schools to do so? Can and should we train existing teachers to use the tools themselves so that they, in turn, can help the students understand and incorporate them into their educational lives? How does collaborative technology change the role of the teacher? How relevant is formal education when access to the world's knowledge-base is often more accessible at home than at school? How significant will collaborative technologies become for the administrative side of education? What role will commercial organizations play in filling in the gaps?

Many feel that educational computing has been the great unfulfilled promise of the last twenty years. Come join us as we discuss how this may be changing, and fast, because of Web 2.0.

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Permalink Reply by Rushton Hurley on February 26, 2008 at 5:18pm

I have a project that might be illustrative - my students and I did a project with a group of college students in Nagasaki over the last few months. Using videos housed at YouTube and embedded in a set of Wikispaces pages, the students shared thoughts about hometowns, which were the subject of the videos made by the Japanese students. We actually met them while in Japan during the February break, and I have never seen a group of young folks in such a situation hit it off so quickly. The professor and I were thrilled to see how well the groups responded to each other, and I do believe that had much to do with the preparation that the web tools allowed.

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Permalink Reply by Dennis O'Connor on March 5, 2008 at 11:12am

A couple of possibilities come to mind.

On Terror and Twitter

There's an interesting teaching story in the recent experiences Reuven Werber, an Israeli tech specialist for a kibbutz based girls high school in Israel. I met Reuven when he took a moodle course I taught on information fluency. He's an advanced web 2.0 thinker and teacher. He's walking the talk to be sure. His posts about a recent terrorist attack on his community provide an edgy and fascinating angle on communications technology. This is a dramatic experience that might tap the fear so many have in the US about school security.

Reuven is a very active user of Ning tech and every other web 2.0 tech out there. Here are links to his blog post on several nings.

http://tinyurl.com/36d3ff

http://tinyurl.com/37v5gp

Dennis (San Marcos)

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Permalink Reply by Dennis O'Connor on March 5, 2008 at 11:34am

Social Bookmarking: Working with del.icio.us Getting the concept across in face to face & online classrooms

I've been teaching the use of delicious in two of my online classes. One is a graduate training program for potential online teachers. The other is an information fluency class that appeals primarily to working professionals in the ed-tech, library media field.

It's always a struggle to get the concept of Internet based collaboration (in this case social bookmarking) across to educators. I've been trying to quickly achieve the Eureka moment when people understand the collaborative power of this kind of app for about a year.

Building the essential concept of thinking and communicating with Internet technology remains a challenging to say the least.

Recently I started teaching hybrid ed-tech classes at Cal-State San Marcos. We meet twice a week and coordinate assignments via WebCT. After 7 years of teaching exclusively on the Internet, working in real time face to face is a blast.

I've got two groups of students taking this prerequisite course for the teacher credential program. They are an eclectic mix of intelligent people from fresh out of high school 18 year olds to 20 somethings about to graduate with their BA's to new post grads and experienced adults returning to school as part of a career change. It's great cross section of people interested in becoming teachers. CSUSM is known for it's technology integration approach to teaching. The goals for my class are ISTE NETS-T.. word for word.

No one in either of my classes had heard of Web2.0. The younger ones use Facebook or Myspace and some photo sharing sites, but had never heard the the term social networking.

We started with blogs on edublog and are slowly building the concept of Internet based collaboration and project based learning. Now I'm teaching them to use del.icio.us as well.

Right now we're working on an introductory research project involving searching, annotated bookmarking, tagging & sharing resources. We'll create a googlepages website based on the delicious tags (3 out of 50 people have created a webpage). I'll also cover googledocs, goolge custom search engines, ethical use of digital resources and video production.

My goal is for this group to become tech literate and ready to go fluent.

I could demo what we're doing with social bookmarking and hopefully help the audience get a Eureka moment.

Den

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