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Most of us in education agree on our needs today: 1. We want good teachers 2. We want good educational content 3. We want to give our learners a bright and hopeful future 4. We want school systems that are relevant to learners and to society 5. We want schools to remedy the social and cultural inequalities that other institutions of society generate

We need to surface technology’s hidden ideologies and philosophies. If we don’t surface these aspects, we dance blindly to a tune that we refuse to acknowledge, but still shapes our moves.

The key question for me is whether we need content in order to start learning or whether content is the by-product of an effective learning experience.

In terms of content, learners should create, teachers should curate.

Technology is, possibly in a positive sense, a lever for change. The systemic innovation that many desire may not be possible through policy decisions alone.

Leadership can be somewhat attended to by the contributions of many. When we distribute control, we distribute responsibility

Today, leaders need co-leaders – people who are active in experimenting and exploring future directions.

Writing excellent, thorough descriptions of what is happening can be very valuable in coming to understand the nuances of a phenomenon.

I have not seen any studies that evaluate the effectiveness of the iPod in listening to music. For end-users, it’s not an issue. They use it because it works. Perhaps research in educational technology should have a similar focus: use it because it exists, because it is a part of society, because it is used in other aspects of their lives. By this metric, simply have computers available and using them for learning is success enough.

If we hope to see inventive thought infused with critical judgment, questions and questioning must become a priority of schooling and must gain recognition as a supremely important technology. We must lay aside the forked branches of earlier times, the divining rods of soothsayers, technologists and futurists. Rather than reading the entrails or taking the omens to determine the future, we wield powerful questions as tools to construct a future of our own choosing.

reflect on the teacher's role in the writing workshop, and the technology available to organize the writing workshop.

Create a Self-Editing checklist that is actually a GoogleForm or the Questionnaire Module in Moodle so you can quickly see class progress in graphs. Students complete this information via a web-based form that allows you to quantitatively track progress in class. Create a bank of online mini-lessons that students can watch and listen to again and again in an archive. Build that in your GoogleSites Wiki or Moodle. Facilitate sharing using recording tools in a discussion forum or Sites wiki. When doing the Group Share during a Writing Workshop, you can either play the students' presentation of the audio (which they recorded when they were ready) or record the feedback students get so that it can be added to the written piece/recording shared. That way, students can come back and reflect on the advice provided by their peers.

Using a Moodle or wiki, you can create a reference point that can house your mini-lesson content, including audio and/or video recordings.

VoiceThread.com - Enables teachers to create an enhanced podcast about the MiniLesson content, but also allow students to contribute audio, text, or video content as comments. This enables many to many interactions.

GoogleDocs Presentation Tool - Enables teachers to create a slideshow that students can participate in chat, as well as contribute slides to.

As wonderful as a writing workshop teacher may be, s/he cannot offer the feedback that ALL students may need. However, online discussion forums through Moodle, attached to wikis, or with blog postings and comments CAN facilitate student to student interaction independent of the teacher. While many fear these kinds of interactions, in online learning, these interactions make or break an online course...or a face to face one.

Collaborative word processors can also serve as a way for students in groups to interact with ONE text online.

Shelly Blake-Pollock, the teacher and author of the TeachPaperless blog (http://teachpaperless.blogspot.com), encourages his students to publish online. Beyond that step, though, he offers feedback on their writing online as well via screencasts, or video recording of his computer screen. Screencasts, or "JingCrits," that he creates are short, less than 5-minute video clips where he highlights student work on screen and offers feedback (View an example - http://bit.ly/bsgVQQ).

Wikis, websites which are authored by a community of people

Podcasting tools allowed for the uploading and syndication of audio files, and podcasts

YouTube pioneered online video sharing

Online social networks also fall within the domain of Web 2.0

Virtual worlds, including online games, are, to some degree, other forms of online social networks

In America in 2006, over 50% of teenagers – across racial and socioeconomic lines – have created pages on online social networks like Facebook and MySpace, and in all likelihood this percentage has increased in the last two years (Lenhart, Madden, Macgill, and Smith, 2007).

Web 2.0 refers to these simple, often free tools for adding content to the Web, but it also refers to systems that allow users to evaluate content. Tagging refers to the process of allowing users to apply key word labels to discrete bits of content.

convergence is one of the most common features in the evolution of Web 2.0 tools.

Whether or not the democratic possibilities of Web 2.0 are realized depends a great deal upon the degree to which users can negotiate for freedom and autonomy within the networks created and controlled by established political and corporate interests.

The driving force behind Web 2.0, the desire to lower the costs of communication, will continue to be a force shaping the web in the decades ahead, and innovations in time-cheap communications are going to present a future full of new surprises. Three other trends at various levels will continue to act on and shape this driving force. First, new platforms will continue to emerge. Second, the functionality in platforms will continue to converge. Third, we should expect to see greater integration between Web 2.0 tools and handheld devices. Finally, we should consider the efforts to those who seek not to extend the Web 2.0 regime, but to transcend it.

No facet of modern life will remain untransformed by the innovations of the Web 2.0.

Online networks may also upset hierarchical corporate structures.

These new platforms may allow different kinds of talents – talents related to online networking, communication and collaboration – to be more highly valued in the work place. They also may allow for employees at the bottom of the corporate hierarchy to more easily bend the ear of those at the top, and the examples of both Linux development and the Toyota production system lend support to this hypothesis (Evans and Wolf, 2005). These flatter, more democratic, more meritocratic social organizations may allow firms to draw out the strengths of their employees with less regard towards their position in the organization.

The fans were not the simple recipients of the movie; instead, they helped to design the film.

If myBO becomes another media for the Obama administration to spread a centrally constructed message, then it becomes another instrument of elite political power. If, however, myBO morphs into my.americangovernment.gov, a space where citizens have the opportunity to contribute and collaborate on solving problems and speaking truth to power, then the democratizing power of Web 2.0 tools may indeed lead to a more democratic republic.

Relationships developed in virtual or online worlds are not pale reflections of “real” world phenomena. They are a new class of meaningful and profound interactions which researchers will have to consider seriously as they try to understand the evolving nature of society in a Web 2.0 world.

hypothesized benefits for using Web 2.0 tools in the classroom with students, which can be organized into four major categories. The first category involves increasing engagement.

Web 2.0 tools provide new avenues to teach fundamental skills, like writing, communication, collaboration, and new media literacy.

In addition to developing both old and new fundamental skills, students also need to rehearse for 21st century situations.

emerging Web tools can enlighten the critique of the contemporary state of education.

The Flat Classroom Project of 2007

While no studies have looked widely across Web 2.0 tools, there is anecdotal evidence that this kind of project is a very rare exception to two normal states. The first normal state with Web 2.0 is failure. Of the hundreds of thousands of blogs and wikis created, most die on the vine. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as one of the advantages of Web 2.0 is that they are both inexpensive and time-cheap to create, and so one can fail repeatedly before finding a model that works. That said, these failed instantiations are not realizing any of the aforementioned hypothesized benefits. The second normal state for Web 2.0 tools are applications that fit neatly into standard, industrial models of education. In these states, a wiki might be used as an easy way for a teacher to create a website as a one-way delivery device for content, rather than a collaborative medium. Or perhaps a student creates a blog as a kind of online portfolio, but her writings are never published widely, never shared with others, or never commented upon by classmates. In a sense the blog has allowed the student to pass in her homework online, but none of the potentially benefits of publishing within a larger critical, collaborative community are realized. If these two states are indeed the norm, then right now Web 2.0 tools may offer tremendous potential for education, but this potential is not much realized.

There is also anecdotal evidence that the distribution of the use of these tools, sophisticated or not, is skewed towards wealthy, suburban communities rather than poorer rural or urban communities.

very few systems have incentives that reward teachers for innovative instruction.

Most teachers learn to teach from their own experience and from mentors, neither of which usually provide an exemplary model for technology use in the classroom.

The driving technical principle behind the evolution of Web 2.0 tools is the reduction of the interaction costs of communication, and these costs will continue to be driven down. As these costs are driven down, we will continue to see the emergence of qualitatively new behaviors and the products of these behaviors will be as or more bizarre to future peoples as Wikipedia and Twitter are to us now. These new behaviors will be at some level democratizing, as they will involve harnessing collaborative energy and collective intelligence to meet cooperative goals. Many of these innovations will level hierarchies and include and involve more people in social systems. They will accelerate globalization by making cross-cultural, cross-content, cross-time-zone conversations even cheaper and take less time to achieve.