Web Seminars Contributed by EDUCAUSE, Social Computing, and Instructional Technologies

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.

In this seminar, Campbell will explore the concepts behind Web 2.0, some of the individual tools and services (Flickr, Facebook, Second Life, del.icio.us) that are commonly listed under this rubric, and the implications of this phenomenon for teaching and learning, particularly in higher education. He will also present several ways in which he and his colleagues have used Web 2.0 tools and services, both as teachers and in their own learning, and comment on the good, the bad, and the ugly results. If time permits, he will also speak to the relationship between Web 2.0 and the open source software movement. Finally, he’ll offer some thoughts on what Web 3.0 might look like, and why educators should care.

New technologies are changing how we teach and learn in classrooms as well as informal learning spaces. Techniques such as blogging, podcasting, and videoblogging once used by tight-knit groups of techies have emerged as key strategies of established media corporations. Social software practices like tagging and intelligent searching are changing how we process information and can potentially change what happens in our formal and informal learning spaces.

Join us as we explore a cross section of emerging technologies and practices including gaming, mobile applications, social and collaborative applications, chat, and clickers. What are the potential implications of students equipped with these technologies? How might they disrupt our existing teaching and learning practices? Are there strategies to help incorporate new technologies into existing infrastructure? How can we ensure that new technologies promote deeper learning?

In this session, we will explore emerging technologies and their integration into campus environments and identify new and emerging technologies. Some of the questions we will ask include how a given technology supports learner-centered principles, how it meets the needs of different types of learners, how it fits with existing campus infrastructure and support systems, the fiscal implications of its widespread adoption, and the policy issues raised by its use.