BlogDale

Hope School are starting to blog and I look forward to reading many exciting posts.

Steve’s presenting on Web 2.0 but only has 30 minutes. Best of luck - there’s so much to get through that’s of worth. I’m sure he will adhere to Levine’s Law. I’m doing a trackback on this post so that he can demonstrate how trackbacks function in the blogosphere.

What’s my favourite Web 2.0 app at the moment? Hmm. Difficult to pin it down. I would find it hard to function without Skype, although I thank the stars that Wordpress Mu is such a reliable platform to run blogs on (it’s what I use for eThink). I love the collaborative potential of wiki, especially in it’s raw form like MediaWiki rather than the word-processor clones like Writely and ZohoWriter (et al). It’s so easy to create links and new pages in wiki, and huge banks of knowledge can be built up rapidly by teams. Wikispaces goes a long way towards the ideal but oh my, those adverts.

Flickr is great when you can get it through a filtering server. ZohoCreator allows the creation of web apps including online database forms so you can survey a huge sample.

But what of learning spaces? I haven’t delved too far into Elgg yet apart from trying the concepts but it’s a beautiful idea to have that “learning landscape” for learners to inhabit and collaborate through, especially if hosted on your own server to keep the blackhats out. Moodle is still top of my favourites list and the Moodle/Elgg integration gets closer. On its own, Moodle wouldn’t rate as Web 2.0 I suppose but it has all the elements of collaboration and social constructivism, like wiki and a rudimentary blog. When does a blog become a forum? I was asked this by a Mr M. Mouse who left a comment on one of my blogs recently. It all depends on the use to which it is put I suppose.
Here’s a list of Web 2.0 apps. It’s getting a bit long in the tooth now but is still well-respected, and there are plenty of others. The “2.0″ suffix is appearing everywhere these days - learning 2.0 (what? Learning is still learning in my book), elearning 2.0 - I even heard “Voice 3.0″ today applied to telephone networks. Ian Davis discusses what Web 2.0 means to him - “Web 2.0 is an attitude not a technology. It’s about enabling and encouraging participation through open applications and services.” - and there are plenty of other ideas of what it means, including Tim O’Reilly who first coined the term. Really, in terms of technological evolution I suppose this new 2-way web should be designated Web 0.0 since this collaboration is what Sir Tim Berners-Lee designed the whole thing for. It’s just taken the rest of us 10 years to catch on.

I think the real strength of this new way of using the web lies in the ways that connections are made between people, between ideas. I think it’s what I was getting at here , that we now have the facility to publish and share and tag whatever ideas we want to an unknown audience, which has the opportunity to respond. This connectivism builds on notions of social constructivism to build a huge learning community that we, as learners, need to use to our advantage.

Just noticing the time, I’d better turn in for the night. Doesn’t it get late early these days?

A group of us have been thinking about ways to make the KS3 curriculum more contemporary. Jude has some superb schemes of work using kitchen designers and Rollercoaster Designers - the pupils at Lacon Childe love them if the blog’s anything to judge opinion by. Similar pupil enthusiasm appears at Thomas Adams where Gill’s pupils collaborate on MissionMaker programs, and at Priory where Trina’s Gamemaker and Missionmaker pupils are blazing a trail with their authoring.

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