Web Seminars Contributed by EDUCAUSE, Second Life, and Social Computing

Since the 1990s, we’ve been putting our Web courses in boxes, mastering enterprise course management systems, and striving for single sign-on seamless integration between all Web-enabled business and academic environments in each of our colleges and universities. Sometime around the turn of the century, however, explosive innovation on the open Web began to turn a “read only” environment into a “read/write” environment. With the development of RSS as a syndication platform, the read/write environment began to support and foster a very powerful, loosely coupled information architecture across the World Wide Web. In 2004, a group led by Tim O’Reilly gave this phenomenon a name: Web 2.0.

Web 2.0 projects have rapidly expanded into a world of social media. From blogs to podcasts, millions of people have published and shared a growing amount of digital content. At the same time virtual worlds have grown in popularity, from massively multiplayer games like World of Warcraft to metaverse projects like Second Life. How do these two movements apply to higher education? Where do Web 2.0 and the metaverse connect? What trends are emerging for the near future?