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Many universities are trying to figure out how they can build "something like YouTube" to support their educational activities. Most of them end up building things that are very little like YouTube in that they tend to lock down the content and make it hard to move into other spaces and mobilize in other conversations. In a sense, these university based sites are about disciplining the flow of knowledge rather than facilitating it.

How teachers are working around overprotective content filters to use Web 2.0 tools in the classroom

"Being online with five-year-olds is something I don't take lightly," she says. "On field trips, we work to keep kids safe. This is the same thing.

The takeaway here for me is that as fantastic as web services are, many of them are controlled by one party and are thus a single point of failure. If they go down or the particular site makes a change to the web service call, it can potentially ripple through the Internet economy if the API is popular.

I think eduBuzz.org has helped create not just this, but far more in terms of explicit reflection that wasn't there before. I'm wondering whether reflection is, in fact, a personal, private thing rather than a community issue, since often the community at large may not choose to be 'interested' in what you have to say. Take live blog posts, for example, written for the author more than the audience. The biggest problem of online communities, and we've seen this, too, in East Lothian and eduBuzz.org, is that novices in particular find it hard to filter information. Angela says that the problem is one students have, but so many of our teachers and managers also have trouble filtering what is important, what is of interest and might be important, what is of interest but might be a waste of time, and what is of no interest at all, personal or professional. Teachers and students are guilty of not knowing how to question the authority of an information source, other than to say blogs must be relatively poor quality and the BBC must be of relatively high quality (both, of course, had had their moments). And again, not just students but for many teachers, too, it is not cool to have an extensive vocabulary to express oneself. We see a resistance in students to use words to say how they are feeling beyond 'good', 'bad' and fine (and I'd be advocating the use of sites like We feel fine to both educate our students and help counter this claim to some extent), and we also see resistance from some teachers to use a more extensive vocabulary to think about teaching and learning. Finally, both teachers and students, because we over test, tend to not want to do anything that doesn't fit into the test. We cut and paste without engaging with material, we can take tests but cannot learn.

As a matter of course, technology is also changing the way teachers teach -- from how they engage their students and manage their classrooms, to how they shape their working day, manage their professional lives -- and indeed how they think about a career in education.

this is affecting the way she manages the class.

"Firstly, I teach in smaller grabs of time," she says, "but this is a good thing. I personally believe that teaching has long been too auditory. It is important to cater for different perceptual styles -- visual, auditory and kinesthetic (learning by doing) -- especially when teaching younger children."