Web 2.0

Social Networking Tools 

The emergence of social networking tools will have an impact on the world by shifting the illusions of individual perceptions on how we as a society will learn together. In the current world we have been taught that there are no consequences for our actions and that it is acceptable to displace blame. We have been taught to break apart our problems and the results have become a fragmented world. Web 2.0 has given individuals the ability to expand the capacity to create new patterns of thinking that are nurtured in collaborative learning. What fundamentally distinguishes Web 2.0 from traditional Web 1.0 read only web is the potential to expand collaboratively on basic disciplines.

Today a new age is evolving, a newly formed conceptual age; an age and time when people collaborate to expand disciplines. A discipline is a developmental path for acquiring certain skills or competencies. In the past we have individually mastered our own proficiencies as we explored our world from one perspective, our own. Now with collaboration technologies individuals are enlightened by becoming aware of individual perspective by exposing ones own knowledge to the outside world. Being myopic with a bit of stigmatism is not a bad way to view the world as it provides a benchmark to an individual’s singular perception. A perception as it is seen through a shattered mirror. The fragmentation of the mirror is in the reflection and how the pieces fit together is in the collaboration of shared thoughts by others. It is in the shared thoughts that our vision clears which makes Web 2.0 both a telescope for new ideas and a microscope for harvesting knowledge.

Indroducing Web 2.0 A Video by Mike King

Download Video: Posted by kingismike at TeacherTube.com.

What is Web 2.0?

Web 2.0 is an expansion of the original applications of Web 1.0 which is most commonly referred to as read only web. Read only web 1.0 allows users to explore the network for information seeking. Web 2.0 is a new set of tools that allows users to collaborate ideas through new mediums of expression. These mediums of web 2.0 expressions technology allow non-web designers to create, remix, and mash together their own content online. Web 2.0 content creation tools occurs through the design of multi-user interfaces such as wiki’s, podcasting, vodcasting, and blogs.

Download Video: Posted by kingismike at TeacherTube.com.

Podcasting and Vodcasting

Video podcasts enable students and teachers to share information with anyone anytime. If a student is absent, she can download the podcast of the recorded lesson. It can be a tool for teachers or administrators to communicate curriculum, assignments and other information with parents and the community. Teachers can record book talks, vocabulary or foreign language lessons, international pen pal letters (podcast pals!), music performance, interviews, debates. Video podcasting can be a publishing tool for student oral presentations. Audio podcasts can be used in all these ways as well. It also allows people to leave a journal. The initials “RSS” are variously used to refer to the following standards:

  • Really Simple Syndication (RSS 2.0)
  • Rich Site Summary (RSS 0.91, RSS 1.0)
  • RDF Site Summary (RSS 0.9 and 1.0)  

RSS formats are specified in XML (a generic specification for data formats). RSS delivers its information as an XML file called an “RSS feed,” “webfeed,” “RSS stream,” or “RSS channel”. 

Resources for Podcasting

Listen To: Three Little Pigs PodCast (The narrative is an overview of the science of PodCasting and its potentials for educational integration)

Audacity

To create a Podcast you will need a audio recording tool. The best free recording tool currently on the market is Audacity. Audacity is an audio editor. It’s features include recording/playing sound, sound editing using Cut, Copy and Paste (with unlimited Undo), track mixing, effects (including Echo, Change Tempo, and Noise Removal). Audacity imports and exports WAV, AIFF, Ogg Vorbis, and MP3 files.

Download Video: Posted by travoltron at TeacherTube.com.

What is a Wiki?

A wiki is a collaborative website which can be directly edited by anyone with access to it. Ward Cunningham, developer of the first wiki WikiWikiWeb, originally described it as “the simplest online database that could possibly work”. One of the best-known wikis is Wikipedia. WikiWikiWeb was the first site to be called a wiki. Ward Cunningham started developing WikiWikiWeb in 1994, and installed it on Internet domain c2.com on March 25, 1995. It was named by Cunningham, who remembered a Honolulu International Airport counter employee telling him to take the so-called “Wiki Wiki” Chance RT-52 shuttle bus linethat runs between the airport’s terminals. According to Cunningham, “I chose wiki-wiki as an alliterative substitute for ‘quick’ and thereby avoided naming this stuff quick-web.” Wiki Wiki is a reduplication of wiki, a Hawaiian-languageword for fast.

  • A collection of websites of hypertext, each of them can be visited and edited by anyone. “Wiki wiki” means “rapidly” in the Hawaiian language.
  • An online collaboration model and tool that allows any user to edit some content of webpage’s through a simple browser.
  • A wiki  is a web application that allows users to add content, as on an Internet forum, but also allows anyone to edit the content. Wiki also refers to the collaborative software used to create such a website (see pbwiki software)

How to Create a Wiki Video Tutorials

How to Create A Skypecast
Download Video: Posted by eduwikius at TeacherTube.com.

Download Video: Posted by hermanwood at TeacherTube.com.

Co-Creating

Co-Creating may become one of the most powerful engines of change and innovations that the education world will experience. Co-Creating with other educators across the nation is like tapping a knowledge pool of similar interest, a reservoir of creativity that may emerge through an enthusiastic wealth of talent producing warehouses of digital curriculum. It will not be an easy change and many tough challenges lie ahead to offset the standardized models of the existing rigors of traditional education. There is nothing wrong with mass co-creating, yet some see it as moving away from traditional practices of “drill and be drilled” forms of learning.

The problems are even more alarming when educators become facilitators of learning that moves distinctly away from mass customization; limiting flexibility and relying on elements of creative thought. After all it was the Wright brothers who decided to fly after mashing together ideas about bicycles and creating new ideas about propulsion and wing designs. True co-creating does entail deeper knowledge of existing technology. Technology that is currently not prevalent in American schools, at least from the digital natives’ point of view. These cries for change are now beginning to take hold as the business world is for the first time recognizing a new workplace; a workplace where individuals use the network to drive company decisions and collaborate daily in a new Web 2.0 environment.

These new initiatives are beginning to emerge nationally recognizing that there is a digital divide between real world business practices and general education career preparations of the work force of tomorrow. The new workforces of the Lego workers are now being recognized for their co-creating ideas, workers that generate the remixing of multiple concepts on a large collaborative scale, creating new mashup products.Is it possible that the real world is moving everyday closer to global collaboration and the self contained classrooms of today are shifting in another direction? A direction of isolation, building the Great Wall of China and containing all knowledge, rigorous curriculum to specified outcomes, measured and assessed to a world where these measurements may no longer be important in determining success in the workforce. Has the term collaboration changed from working well with others to the mixing of ideas for the recreation of deeper meanings of the disciplines?

In this new of world of digital natives who will monitor exactness? Who will control the truest forms of knowledge for others to repeat the same paths of learning? Who will be the valedictorians of their class as individuals climb the latter to earn their rights to prestigious degrees of higher learning? All of these questions will be pondered as the world becomes flat. In fact the gap between the development and use of technology is like crossing the grate digital divide of leaving all children behind. Are we now standing on the other side of the great digital divide looking for ways to bridge the gap? And is it to late to cross over?

Co-Creating A Video by Mike King

Download Video: Posted by kingismike at TeacherTube.com.

Web 2.0: The New Alexandrian Libraries

As the 21st century dawns, Americans are once again experiencing a profound and rapid shift–from an Industrial Age to an Information Age. American schools are experiencing what historians of the future will call the Third Industrial Revolution, a transition to a knowledge-based universal substrate of knowledge based linking of the internet to co-collaboration websites of the new Alexandrian libraries of the future. To secure the workplace of the future, young people will need the skills and knowledge base associated with Web 2.0 shared canvases, where every splash of paint provides a richer tapestry of knowledge. To succeed in education reform schools must be broadly driven by forward-thinking educational technology minded visionaries. These visionaries must articulate clear and compelling learner outcomes that articulate the optimal characteristics that encourage technology-supported education reform that focuses on preparing students to live, learn, and work in the 21st century.  

To ensure that students have a brighter future, educators must look at their traditional practices and expand beyond the status quo in order to kindle a spirit that unites all the stakeholders into a well designed Web 2.0 virtual learning schooling. By cultivating enriched technological environments for learning where teachers are given more opportunities to work together, a Virtual Learning Web 2.0 school establishes the confidence and trust needed for desired change. However, educational leaders must first understand the strategies involved in allowing stakeholders to gain confidence in technological advances to Web 2.0 Learning and contribute their ideas.  

Web 2.0 virtual learning schools are founded on a different set of standards than those schools founded on traditional practices. The Web 2.0 schools are places where both the professional educators, students, parents and the community are engaged in active learning based upon self-improvement goals. In the Virtual Learning School, the role of the educators is to seek out expanded technology based learning opportunities that benefit not only student learning but also the school as a whole and the improvement of the learning process. There are many factors that contribute to the Web 2.0 Virtual Learning School, but one of the major factors is the development of a successful technology plan that inspires people to share their knowledge, collaborate on their knowledge, and finally develop their knowledge into a technology paradigm shift for the future.   

The new Web 2.0 is different in its architecture for it now offers new applications where learners can share, create and contribute to new knowledge by direct participation rather than receiving passive information. True integration of technology into the learning process is a united effort among all constituents’ and educational leaders must layout a strategic plan for implementing technology into the school. These strategies should include the development of (1) Empowerment through an articulated vision to create a Virtual Web 2.0 learning opportunities for both teachers and students.  

To meet the challenge of the skills needed for the workforce of tomorrow, schools will need to realign their present visions by establishing new priorities that are linked to the new standards of co-creating environments in Web 2.0 collaborations. This does not mean that schools must change their beliefs; however, they must examine how their present beliefs support the challenges of required change. If schools are to be viewed as workforce providers of the future, then they must engage in strategic exploration of Web 2.0 potentials for the expansion of knowledge.  

It is true that making this paradigm shift from the industrial age to the information age during a time of uncertainty finds many a scholar not sure just how virtual learning will serve in the improvement of teaching and learning. For more than two centuries, schools have used printed paper materials, such as textbooks, to educate students. With the development of new technologies, virtual learning resources are reaching a limitless realm. Schools that are not presently tapping into these resources soon will find themselves left behind in their quest to improve the learning curve.  This is not to say that technology, alone, will educate today’s students. Technology is the tape measure in the toolbox that teachers can use to extend student learning opportunities. In order for schools to reach their vision for implementing school-based technology learning programs schools must be empowered to draw the pathways to get from the present to the future.  

Web 2.0 virtual learning cannot exist without a shared vision. Without a focus and commitment to some vision/goal that the schools truly want to achieve, the forces supporting the status quo can overwhelm the forces supporting meaningful change. With shared vision, the educators are more likely to expose their accustomed ways of thinking and redefine them in more coopera­tive and constructive terms, thereby recognizing personal and organizational short­comings. Thus, developing a collective vision for the future of the virtual learning school is the first strategy to a systematic design for successful paradigm shift into the future.  At its simplest level, a shared vision is the answer to the question, “What do we want to create?” Just as personal visions are pictures or images people carry in their heads and hearts, so too are shared visions pictures that people throughout the school carry because it reflects their own personal vision. Therefore, shared visions create a sense of community that permeates the school and gives purpose and meaning to diverse activities. Shared vision is vital for the virtual learning school because it provides the focus and energy for learning. 

In many school organizations, intoxicating rhetoric about visions and noble intentions usually abounds, but without a strategy for communicating those ideas, nothing will be realized. Achieving success will require more than rhetoric; it will require the capacity to communicate a compelling image of a desired state of affairs - the kind of image that induces enthusiasm and commitment in others. 

How do schools communicate their vision and future goals? How do they then get their stakeholders aligned behind those goals? The answers to these questions can be obtained through the management of meaning - or the mastery of communication. To master meaning through communications schools of the future will need to design architecture for Web 2.0 learning environments for the expansion of structured exact knowledge outside of the normal classroom day. These newly designed Web 2.0 architectures will initiate all necessary points required for the planned implementation of methods addressing the issues of quality learning both at home and at school.  

The bottom line is this: The unassailable, standalone Website is out the door. So say hello to a Web that looks like a library that interacts and talks.  

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