Late last year I attempted to give an introduction to 'Web 2.0' for novices and discuss the implications of 'Web 2.0' applications for design and the higher ed sphere.
This month in the EDUCAUSE Review Bryan Alexander does a much better job of it in his article Web 2.0: A new wave of innovation for teaching and learning. I highly recommend you read it if you at all interested in the development of the web and its relationship to learning and teaching.
There's been a lot of hype around Web 2.0 and accompanying cyncism, some of which has a point. Alexander's article gets behind the hype and highlights a few of the critical elements. For me these were:
- The idea of microcontent. That is, thinking about content in terms of chunks and not pages. This has huge implications for design, for content syndication and the way in which people think about the web.
- Social bookmarking and writing platforms that offer great potential for researchers and anyone working in a collaborative environment. He points out some unis are already using these sorts of tools, for example the Penntags project and H20 at Harvard. Last week I pointed out Connotea and the tried and true favourite CiteULike has been around for while.
I don't think the web, especially the 'social' side of it, can be ignored when it comes to teaching students and communicating with them generally. The reality is undergraduate students are coming to university already comfortable with the notion of a social space online (think MySpace, blogs, and boredofstudies). This is how they find information, they are used to the non-linear web world, they are used to communicating online. They have learned to learn this way. It would be crazy to ignore it.