ClappingTree’s Web 2.0

ATTENDED two very interesting online sessions in Dr Terry Anderson’s MDE663 course (Emerging Issues in Distance Education Technologies) over the last two Thursday mornings. Upon reflection now, i’m beginning to think/feel that:

• The first reactions of many people towards RSS, blogs, wikis, Elgg, Elluminate, Furl, Moodle, etc. seem to be, “Gasp! How overwhelming!”, “Are writings in blogs (or wikis, etc.) academically rigorous?”, “Can one really use these tools to teach a real course? How?”
• Wow! I’m already quite familiar with almost all the tools that are being explored in this course — thanks to several fortuituous turns of events in my life. In fact, I now use many routinely in my daily knowledge gathering and management activities.
• However, having conducted several learning experiments among real students over the past two years, it’s still not very clear to me what the model answers are. One thing that does stand out is this: Students who already meet one another face-to-face often have very little motivation to do things online with one another. On the other hand, distance learners who study alone are very likely to be keen to interact socially, cognitively, etc. with one another. Therefore, Dr Anderson’s paper, Distance Learning — Social Softwares Killer Ap?, certainly struck a chord in me.
  

Finally, Writely is ready to be used with Google Mail accounts. And registrations are now open to all. I like it because I can:

• Upload Word documents, OpenOffice, RTF, HTML or text (or create documents from scratch).
• Use a simple WYSIWYG editor to format documents, spell-check them, etc.
• Invite others to share documents (by e-mail address).
• Edit documents online with whomever I hoose.
• View any document’s revision history and roll back to any version.
• Publish documents online to the world, or to just who I choose.
• Download documents to my desktop as Word, OpenOffice, RTF, PDF*, HTML or zip.
• Post documents to my blog.

A neat summary of Web 2.0 by a student in Edublogs.org, giving many concrete examples:

Afternote 05-04-2007: Shortly after posting this, I found out that the above list was actually taken from a 2005 article by Tim O’Reilly. Here’s just a note to clarify this. Read the rest of this entry »

Edublogs.org has turned one on 31st July. Belated happy anniversary!

Was a little amused to read this post by founder James Farmer:

As for blogs on May 23rd the 10,000th edublogs.org blog was created. Which was great. But as of this moment today (August 14th) there are 17,869 blogs. Yikes.

Splogs… the plague of our times! :-p Still, looking forward to seeing the new site (already integrated with wikispaces) — expected to incorporate Flickr, YouTube, and other widgets.