This week I was fortunate to be able to attend a seminar presentation by Associate Professor Matthew Allen, called “Using Web 2.0 in Your Teaching”. Matthew is a Teaching Fellow of the Australian Learning and Teaching Council and is the leader of the ‘Learning in Networks of Knowledge‘ (LINK) project.
Matthew emphasised that Web 2.0 is about connection and stressed that when thinking about Web 2.0 we need to take into consideration the 4Cs.
- Components: what feeds into the knowledge work system
- Cognition and Collaboration: thinking and working together forms the processing system
- Communication: the results of processing become public and the basis of audience reception and conversation
Matthew presented us with his top 10 Web 2.0 tools and gave us some great ways to use them for learning & teaching. It was useful to be reminded that it’s not about the tool, it’s about what you can do with the tool. Here’s his list – I was surprised that I was only familiar with only two of them. They may not all be mainstream, but they could add value to the learning activities/ experiences you develop.
- xtimeline – xtimeline enables users to create timelines of events, in a constrained but flexible format, with collaboration features, and public communication options
- listphile – “a powerful tool for organizing and collaborating around structured information. Call it a database tool, if you will (but please don’t scare anyone away)” [**I couldn’t access this link today, but will check again later]
- slinkset – slinkset creates social news sites, private, shared or public like digg, with extensive yet simple to use design features
- posterous – posterous is a powerful yet simple blogging engine with a particular emphasis on ease of posting: do it by email
- mind42 – Mind mapping is … about entering ideas, arranging them … and refining and deepening ideas with colors, links and other attributes”
- quizlet – quizlet is a flashcard production and use system, with inbuilt group and collaboration features and innovative ways of testing knowledge
- reviewbasics – reviewbasics is a web-based service allowing users to work together to review documents, websites images with an emphasis on annotation
- springnote – “wiki, word processing, and file organization [and] … sharing, having collaborators… to organize all the information you need at your fingertips”
- knol.google – knol is Google’s answer to Wikipedia: editable, classified user-generated content based on the idea of a ‘knol’ (a unit of knowledge)
- wiggio – comprehensive group collaboration tool: calendars, to do, sharing, online meeting and polling … people work as teams, not a group of individuals
You can also access the presentations on each of the tools on Slideshare, and a video recording of Matthew’s presentation capturing his discussion on each of the tools. You can follow Matthew on Twitter and read more of his work on his website (look for ‘writing’ tab).
Tags: activities, tools