Online teaching techniques - anotated bibliography

Digimind; Le Web 2.0 pour la veille et la recherche d’information; Exploitez les ressources ; http://www.digimind.com; viewed in 17/11/2009

• This is a document made for the enterprise (Digimind) workers. It is however very interesting because it pretends to be a document that allows to everyone that is interested to know what really is the web 2.0.
• The document give us a definition of the web2.0 and its principles, explain the technologies, has a glossary, tell us in what and for what it is useful and before telling us the conclusions, it give us a panoramic of web 2.0. limitations.
  

Bryan Alexander; Web 2.0 A new wave of innovation for teaching and learning? Viewed in 17/11/2009

Through these sentences we can see what Bryan Alexander has to tell us about web 2.0 and its possibilities:

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

• Rather than following the notion of the Web as book, they are predicated on microcontent

• Social bookmarking is one of the signature Web 2.0 categories, one that did not exist a few years ago and that is now represented by dozens of projects.

• Researchers at all levels (students,faculty, staff) can quickly set up a social bookmarking page for their personal and/or professional inquiries

• Users can also subscribe to tags and receive a list of URLs tagged with a certain word on their del.icio.us page.
• Each annotated tag is dated, editable, and organized in reverse chronological order, blog-style.

• Web services have evolved, projects have emerged that act as social writing platforms.
• After e-mail lists, discussion forums, groupware, documents edited and exchanged between individuals, and blogs, perhaps the writing application most thoroughly grounded in social interaction is the wiki. Wiki pages allow users to quickly edit their content from within the browser window. At a smaller level, other Web 2.0 services are aimed at somewhat more constrained yet still easily collaborative writing.

• social writing platforms support people creating and editing each other’s content, a different group of Web 2.0 services explores that content from the outside, as it were. Blogging has become, in many ways, the signature item of social software, being a form of digital writing that has grown rapidly into an influential force in many venues, both on- and offline.

• Many of these services allow users to save their searches as RSS feeds to be returned to and examined in an RSS reader, such as Bloglines (http://www.bloglines.com/) or NetNewsWire (http://ranchero.com/netnewswire/).

• Social writing platforms appear to be logistically useful tools for a variety of campus needs, from student group learning to faculty department work to staff collaborations.

• 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.
• The rich search possibilities opened up by these tools can further enhance the pedagogy of current events
• The extensive growth of Web 2.0 projects has even more recently given rise to tools that make use of multiple services simultaneously.

• Web 2.0’s lowered barrier to entry may influence a variety of cultural forms with powerful implications for education, from storytelling to classroom teaching to individual learning.

Simon Heid, Thomas Fischer and Walter F. Kugemann; Good Practices for Learning 2.0:Promoting Innovation

• “This report is part of the research project “Learning 2.0 – the Impact of Web 2.0 Innovations on Education and Training in Europe”,1 launched by the Institute for Prospective Technological Studies (IPTS) in collaboration with the European Commission Directorate General Education and Culture (DG EAC) at the beginning of 2008. The project aims to gather evidence on the take up of social computing by European Education and Training (E&T) institutions, in order to understand the impact of this phenomenon on innovations in educational practice and its potential for a more inclusive European knowledge society. The project also sets out to identify challenges and bottlenecks so as to devise policy options for European decision makers.”

• “This report presents the results of the in-depth study of 8 initiatives employing social computing tools in innovative ways in predominantly formal learning settings. The case assessment examines impacts and outcomes, factors for failure and success, as well as obstacles and barriers, in order to assess good practice and the impact of Learning 2.0 on innovation.”
• “The results of this study have been presented at the validation workshop and will feed into the final report of the Learning 2.0 project. They also contribute to continuing previous work conducted in the IS Unit at IPTS,7 in particular the recently concluded IPTS “Exploratory Research on Social Computing” (ERoSC) and the IPTS vision on future “Learning Spaces”, models for future learning in the Knowledge Society, where technologies mediate new participative and flexible opportunities for learning.”

Tom Franklin; Mark van Harmelen; Web 2.0 for Content for Learning and Teaching in Higher Education viewed in 17/11/09

• “This report is the result of a study into the use of Web 2.0 technologies for content creation for learning and teaching in Higher Education, funded by the JISC, and carried out between March and May 2007. It draws on existing studies, interviews with staff at universities who have implemented Web 2.0 technologies for learning and teaching, and a week-long web based seminar (webinar) with expert contributions, both from speakers and the audience. The report builds on the briefing documents that were written especially for the webinar and the results of the webinar discussions, many of which can be found in the Moodle site that was used to support the conference.”

In this document we can find:

• How Web 2.0 will affect how universities go about the business of education, from learning, teaching and assessment, through contact with school communities, widening participation, interfacing with industry, and maintaining contact with alumni.
• the possible realms of learning to be opened up by the catalytic effects of Web 2.0 technologies are attractive, allowing greater student independence and autonomy, greater collaboration, and increased pedagogic efficiency
• That Because Web 2.0 is a relatively ‘young’ technology, there are many unresolved problems and issues in its use in universities
• Most importantly, because the use of Web 2.0 in various areas of application (learning, teaching, administration, management) is still in an early stage, we recommend that institutions take a light-weight approach use of regulations that might constrain experimentation with the technologies and allied pedagogies.

• Recommendations about.