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EDUCAUSE REVIEW | March/April 2006, Volume 41, Number 2

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on 2006-07-26 by tmiket

such

on 2006-12-01 by jlesage

web 2.0 in education

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Web 2.0: A New Wave of Innovation for Teaching and Learning? Bryan Alexander Bryan Alexander is Director for Research at the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education (NITLE). Comments on this article can be sent to the author at

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The term is audacious: Web 2.0. It assumes a certain interpretation of Web history, including enough progress in certain directions to trigger a succession. The label casts the reader back to Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s unleashing of the World Wide Web concept a little more than a decade ago, then asks: What forms of the Web have developed and become accepted enough that we can conceive of a transition to new ones?

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Web 2.0: A New Wave of Innovation for Teaching and Learning? Bryan Alexander Bryan Alexander is Director for Research at the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education (NITLE). Comments on this article can be sent to the author at

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Social software has emerged as a major component of the Web 2.0 movement.

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Web 2.0: A New Wave of Innovation for Teaching and Learning?

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Web 2.0: A New Wave of Innovation for Teaching and Learning?

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Web 2.0: A New Wave of Innovation for Teaching and Learning?

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Pedagogically, one can imagine writing exercises based on these tools, building on the established body of collaborative composition practice. These services offer an alternative platform for peer editing, supporting the now-traditional elements of computer-mediated writing—asynchronous writing, groupwork for distributed members, and so on—but with a different, wiki-like spin.

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Readers can push back on a blog post by commenting on it. These comments are then addressable, forming new microcontent.

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Technorati is perhaps the most famous blog-search tool. Among other functions, it has emphasized tagging as part of search and discovery, recommending (and rewarding) users who add tags to their blog posts. Bloggers can register their site for free with Technorati; their posts will then be searchable by content and supplemental tags.

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or example, we have long taught and learned from news articles. Indeed, a popular metaphor for describing RSS reading is the clipping service of old. Since blogs, most social bookmarking tools, and other services are organized in reverse chronological order, their very architecture orients them, or at least their front pages, toward the present moment. Web 2.0 therefore supports queries for information and reflections on current events of all sorts. Given bloggers’ propensity for linking, not to mention some services’ ability to search links, blogs and other platforms readily lead the searcher to further sources. Students can search the blogosphere for political commentary, current cultural items, public developments in science, business news, and so on.

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A related Web service is Memeorandum (http://www.memeorandum.com/), the punningly named project that integrates news stories and blog responses. Memeorandum displays a series of topics and adds to each one both journalistic accounts and blogospheric opinion. It resembles the classic newspaper style of including news and op-ed pages within the same section, but it draws on thousands of sources, rather than a handful, and from far more diverse stances. Like Blogdex and Zeitgeist, Memeorandum—through the topics presented—offers a glimpse into the collective mind of many, many people at a given moment.

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A political science class could explore different views of a news story through traditional media using Google News, then from the world of blogs via Memeorandum. A history class could use Blogdex in an exercise in thinking about worldviews. There are also possibilities for a campus information environment. What would a student newspaper look like, for example, with a section based on the Digg approach or the OhmyNews structure?

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SuprGlu (http://www.suprglu.com/) builds Web pages in which users’ RSS feeds from multiple services are aggregated. For example, a professor might include the del.icio.us feeds from a research group and senior seminar alongside a series of blogs from colleagues around the world. At a meta-meta level, SuprGlu plans on letting users form RSS feeds from their many incoming streams. Gnosh (http://webtools.allegheny.edu/gnosh/), a related project, was created within higher education by tech leads at Allegheny and Vassar Colleges, stemming from a NITLE social software users group meeting. Gnosh searches multiple Web 2.0 and similar services while letting users store and share their queries. As with Rollyo, a student could build a group-of-search area. Unlike Rollyo, Gnosh queries a much broader content field. Users can visualize their results or the searches of others by tags or keywords.

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