pathways | an educator's notebook

George Siemens presents an informative overview (as a PowerPoint presentation and audio commentary) of the use of Web 2.0 technologies in schools and universities. He also comments that social networking tools can help organizations become more "self-aware"; at least, when not hindered by restrictive business practices. An "8-week workshop" on the uses of Web 2.0 technologies can be found here.

As a useful complement, Dave Pollard offers a summary and critique of the rapidly expanding suite of social networking applications and presents his reasons why many of these powerful social networking tools remain underutilized.

I briefly touched on this in a previous post, but if you haven't already checked out the archive of presentations and discussions made during the K12 Online Conference earlier this month, then you owe to yourself to do so. It's a wonderful resource with all you need to whet your appetite, get started, and further develop your and your students' skills.

And... I haven't had a chance to try this out much, but it looks promising. Will Richardson has already set up a page on Darfur/Sudan which:
 

is built on tag feeds from YouTube for videos, Flickr for photos, the New York Times AND the Sudan Tribune for news, del.icio.us for what people are bookmarking, and Google Blogsearch for, well, blogs. What you get is a dynamic, constantly updated page of content about what’s happening in that part of the world and what’s happening in other parts of the world in response.

PageFlakes is also building in student-specific templates, which include:
 

among other things a grade tracker, message board, to do list, and contact list. Again, since the student has the ability to keep these portals private, there are all sorts of ways that we can start introducing RSS and content management types of skills.

Mac users beware, though. Safari is currently not supported. Time for Firefox...

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