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Martin Weller is Professor of Educational Technology at OU-UK, and was instrumental in developing its first e-learning initiatives. He blogs at The Ed Techie, but his essay was part of a special edition of the education journal On the Horizon. Authors contributing to the special edition (which isn't yet available) were asked to contribute a blog post describing their articles in a condensed form; Weller's post appeared at the editor's blog.

Higher education faces a challenge. It may not now it yet, but it does. And the challenge is this - when learners have been accustomed to very facilitative, usable, personalisable and adaptive tools both for learning and socialising, why will they accept standardised, unintuitive, clumsy and out of date tools in formal education they are paying for? It won't be a dramatic revolution (students accept lower physical accommodation standards when they leave home for university after all), but instead there will be a quiet migration. The monolithic LMSs will be deserted, digital tumbleweed blowing down their forums. Students will abandon these in favour of their tools, the back channel will grow and it will be constituted from content and communication technologies that don't require a training course to understand and that come with a ready made community. This may seem like just a technological issue, but it runs deeper than this.

Mark up websites, graphics, and photos, or start brainstorming on a blank canvas. Browse the web with your friends or make that conference call more productive than ever. No plug-ins, downloads, or firewall voodoo - it's all here, ready to go when you are. Browser-agnostic, user-friendly.

Recently I was asked to write an article for the European Council of International Schools Shortcuts Newsletter about using web 2.0 tools to develop

Martina Goehring berichtet über die Erfahrungen aus dem LERNET 2.0-Projekt.

take a look at some of the most compelling new sites that have launched in just the few short months since President Obama took office: * Data.gov, providing open access to feeds of valuable facts and figures generated by the executive branch. * USAspending.gov, allowing any of us to drill down into the details of spending from various federal agencies. * Recovery.gov, perhaps one of the best-known of the new sites, offering up details of how resources from the Recovery Act are being allocated. * And of course, there's WhiteHouse.gov. You know about that one. What's remarkable about these sites is not merely that they exist; There had been some efforts to provide this kind of information in the past. Rather, what stands out is that they exhibit a lot of the traits of some of the best tech startups in Silicon Valley or New York City. Each site has remarkably consistent branding elements, leading to a predictable and trustworthy sense of place when you visit the sites. There is clear attention to design, both from the cosmetic elements of these pages, and from the thoughtfulness of the information architecture on each site. (The clear, focused promotional areas on each homepage feel just like the "Sign up now!" links on the site of most Web 2.0 companies.) And increasingly, these services are being accompanied by new APIs and data sources that can be used by others to build interesting applications.

Google Wave has the potential to turn the web on it's head. Amongst other things, it could spell the final death-knell for VLEs, or be their rebirth.

Exemplo prático duma iniciativa europeia: há grandes camadas da população sem acesso às novas e múltiplas oportunidades, tais como as Web 2.0 ou a aprendizagem móvel. Mas mesmo os que usam os novos meios digitais de forma regular não estão forçosamente alfabetizados digitalmente falando. A literacia digital não quer apenas dizer que as pessoas dispõem da infra-estrutura técnica, quer também dizer que sabem tirar proveito das hipóteses que as novas tecnologias lhes oferecem. O que é que isto quer realmente dizer? E porque é que a literacia digital é tão importante? Damos respostas a estas perguntas neste artigo.

that's not cool web safety site-great vids,

"Cuil searches more pages on the Web than anyone else-three times as many as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft."

A Wall that allows virtual sticky notes to be stored on the web - Walls can be private or public an can be edited by names groups or the public