Survey of Web 2.0 in Education

This is an interesting idea. This is more or less the way forty-somethings have decided to use Twitter: can the kids join in too?

Article about young peoples' use of the internet while studying and revising. Looks at differences as being Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants phrases coined by Marc Prensky. Cites Rose Luckin and Wilma Clarke from the London Knowledge Lab, Institute of Education. Work by Brian Kelly also mentioned

Description of Project Pad2 which looks like a powerful tool for being able to annotate various types of media and also work collaboratively on them.

Potentially very useful tool for helping to organise your personal research bibliographic materials

Executive summary of work by Caroline Sharp (2001) updating the research into homework and its effectiveness.

BBC News article regarding developments for social networking sites, including Bebo interface tools being possible to use in Facebook.

Full article by Tracy Caldwell (Jan 2007) referred to by Charles Crook looking at JISC's work looking at Web 2.0 and some of the issues raised such as the ease of copying and pasting and the subsequent potential or actual infringement of intellectual property rights or copyrights.

Interesting video response made to the YouTube video "Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us" by Michael Wesch. Discussion centres around the internet in reality just being written text or video being transmitted. What participation there is, is created to simulate real life social interaction and heading for a virtual reality.

[This authors note: However, IMHO this misses the point that it is not the web adapting to us, but us adapting to the tools the internet can provide. The tools were not designed to mimick natural interaction. The web seems to be heading along two paths of interaction and collaboration. a) Those tools which build on current paterns of collaboration and interaction, eg email, wiki's, Google Docs, Vyew.com and are developing further to enahnce this collaboration, eg incorporation of calendars into email, calendar sharing, mash ups, etc, but in essence refining and building on the skills we acquired to use these forms of internet communication. The other direction the web appears to be taking is trying to imitate reality or augment reality such as Second Life. The issue here is that social interaction in reality occurs on so many different levels with different channels of communication, such as verbal and non verbal communications (verbal nuances, tone, body language, facial expression, physical limitations) which for true reality need to be replicated and for others to be able react to them. Of course mentioning physical limitations opens a whole new can of worms, but an exmple is how would we react if in real life we could always see somebody waving to us from over a mile away or more? Another example is how does a partially sighted or sight impaired individual respond to visual signals given on the web? Can it be done? yes, but should it?]

[Reference also in the Web2.0 Wiki]
Well presented video by Professor Michael Wesch lookign at Web 2.0 from a point of view including how the web has changed from HTML to XML the differences, how this has helped mash-ups and changing the online community.

Link to full text article (via Science Direct) by Cath Everett 2007 regarding identity and access management.

Positional paper by Alan Gilchrist (2007) considering whether Web 2.0 can be used within organisations and their intranets. Paper covers a number of interesting points about Web 2.0.

Comment in the New Scientist about potential knock-on effects of a patent awarded to Yahoo! that allows users to customise a webpage template to display data drawn from other sources.

Description of mash-ups and links to examples.

Link to paper by Kipp (2007) looking at tagging practices on Research Oriented social bookmarking sites.

Short post about "Scuttle" a social bookmarking application you can host on your own server. Also comments about problems social bookmarking sites can have such as being used for spam.

Short explanation for teachers by McDaniel College, US about what social booking marking is and how it can be used for teaching purposes.