Bryan, Kathleen, and Jason Brown

This is going to be a great ride. Bryan is talking about his 11 year old who is tech-savvy though not a techie per se. She has trouble with LMSs with is like the web of the 90s which she has no familiarity with that style.

Blogs and wikis are not new technologies. Web 2.0 is like fight club. The first rule is there is no Web 2.0. Key component is microcontent. Web 2.0 is social. It's about open content, open access and standards. This can be descriptive or prescriptive. Network constructivism--content built upon by others. Perpetual beta--always adding features.

Collaborative writing projects--wikipedia. Wikinews. Blogs. Content chunks. There are stable urls for everything. Distributed conversations. There are 50 million blogs. The social object, i.e. a picture in flickr. Flickr has 100 million images. Need an object to connect around.

Tagging or folksonomies. Museums using it extensively.

AJAX. Microcontent and mashing it up.

RSS.

Are LMSs Web 2.0 compliant? Somewhat. What pieces of Web 2.0 can we bring into LMSs? The world is heading in the direction of Web 2.0. Take advantage of existing content. Make your own stuff. Host your own blogs.

Whatever you think about it, we have to start talking about these things.

Now Jason and Kathleen are showing work they've done on one of Kathleen's courses. Implemented c-panel to make it easy to install secondary applications like WordPress or Drupal. Kathleen states that she's going to be a fly in the ointment. But there are definitely things she likes some things about LMSs. Designed for faculty, not students. Need to move from course management to learning facilitation. Needs to be about interaction, move toward social software. I'm totally with her. LMSs are mainly information management systems, deals primarily with administrivia and while that's an important feature, it's not the only thing. The discussion board feature was used by 76% of the students but only by 36% of the faculty. Kathleen suggests that the discussion forum should not function as substitutes, but as enhancements to the liberal arts classroom.

Class requirements have to be very clear when you're using a new tool. She has a blog and a wiki. She's using the blog for individual assignments and the wiki for a collaborative writing project.

For her, the audience element is very important. There are risk. You have to give up a little control.

Discussion. Ellen from Bates seconds the use of Web 2.0 tools increasing student participation through a kind of competitiveness.

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