Web 2.0

This 57 minute podcast features the opening keynote address from the EDUCAUSE 2008 Midwest Regional Conference. The speech was delivered by Susan E. Metros, Deputy CIO & Associate Vice Provost at the University of Southern California, and is entitled, "Challenging IT Leaders to Mashup, Twitter, Tag, and Poke: New IT Strategies for a Digital Society".

Today's youth are digitally titillated, visually stimulated, and socially connected. To educate and engage this new breed of learners, institutions of higher education are revisiting and revising the basic tenants of a general education by asking, What does it means to be literate in today's society? As educators transform the way they teach and conduct research, IT leaders also must alter their institution's IT strategy to best support a mobile, global digital citizenry.

Flickr is a photo-sharing website where anyone can upload and tag photos, browse others' photos, and add comments and annotations. It provides a platform for sharing creative work and allows users to engage in a conversation about a photo, building a sense of community and enabling collective knowledge construction. The 7 Things You Should Know About Flickr, EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative’s (ELI) latest brief in the monthly series, examines how Flickr embodies what has come to be known as Web 2.0 technology.

Browse the complete 7 Things You Should Know About… monthly series.

Presentation given by FR Nordengren, Des Moine University.  He is an education technology strategist and works in the college of health sciences.  His job: Assess student engagement with technology, find out how we can maximize the current tools we use.  Create a formal faculty mentoring program. 

23 Things - Helene Blowers (Librarian) She set up a way for staff to study 23 contemporary tools on the web, they were incentivised and challenged to learn about these tools.

He decided that he needed the FedEx arrow (look between the e and the x) - if you have no budget and you need a person to think about your product, tell them that whenver they see the fedex arrow to think about the product. 

So borrowing from these two sources, he came up with 12 resonable tools to represent what Web 2.0 is all about - that the faculty could review, research, study in 10 months.  Things such as RSS feeds, google documents, blogger page, flakes, google alerts, tagging information, podcasting, facebook, wikipedia, flickr, ect.

James Varn, Director of Faculty Development, Mississippi Valley State Univ., gave this presentation.  Not quite sure there are still people out there who are not familiar with Google docs anymore.  However, there are probably some people who may need to know what you can do with google documents. He suggests that chat within Gmail works really well.  He gave an overview of Gmail and google docs.  The advantage of google docs is that everyone can contribute, you can track the document revisions in real time.  You can control who has access to the document.  You can conduct peer reviews, work on group projects, review history of revisions, will convert to word or pdf formats, use it for brainstorming or project papers for comments.  Google docs allows you to insert comments, compare revisions to determine work each student has contributed.  Google docs also has spreadsheets and presentations.  Google groups is nothing more than a discussion group.  You can create a discussion topics, add people to the discussion, etc.  Goggle talk is just a basic instant messaging app.

In this 31 minute podcast we feature a conversation from the ELI 2008 Annual Meeting. The topic is Second Life and virtual worlds. How can virtual world participation help students become active learners? How can instructors approach virtual worlds with an eye toward their own curriculum. Are there any privacy or safety issues that must be breached in getting your students on Second Life? Particpants in this discussion include:

In this podcast we feature a conversation with Bryan Alexander, Director for Research at the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education (NITLE) , and Gail Matthews-DeNatale, Associate Director for Academic Technology at Simmons College . This discussion was recorded at the ELI 2008 Annual Meeting in San Antonio, Texas.

Digital storytelling merges leading-edge technology with age-old storytelling processes. Digital stories are typically in video format but can also include Web pages, digital maps, and other emerging technology mashups. With the addition of a Web 2.0 focus, audience also becomes co-author. How do these concepts apply to pedagogy and how can instructors evaluate and assess the process and final product?

Gail Matthews-DeNatale presented a session at ELI 2008 entitled, "Digital Story Making: Understanding the Learner's Perspective".