TPTE 595
Classroom Applications: Web 2.0
This course really reflects the evolution of web content, even looking at as small a period of time as the four years I’ve been in the IT program.The web has really always in some sense been about sharing information, dating back as far as ARPANET in the 1960s. What’s rapidly changing though is the interaction model for that sharing. The web in the late ’90s and early ’00s was dominated by large sites. It was really more of a broadcast model like you see in television – a single, large entity creating content to be viewed by a large number of people.
Increasingly, though, the web is dominated by user-generated content. The most heavily visited sites feature content created and uploaded by its users: Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, Blogger, Twitter, WordPress… the only other sites boasting comparable levels of traffic are search engines, and those are just searchable indexes of other peoples’ content. Actually, the site you’re reading now (mine) is a WordPress site, hosted on my own hosting account, and allowing me to be my very own web publisher.
Our Web 2.0 course sought to explore just what this Web 2.0 shift has meant in learning. We looked at several Web 2.0 apps that can be used to great effect in a learning environment: blogs, wikis, podcasts, RSS, social bookmarking, and others. Along the way, I purchased this domain name and created a WordPress site, to contain a blog that class participants were to use to discuss our Web 2.0 discoveries. Most all of the ‘Technology‘ postings on my site came about during the Web 2.0 course.
We also created digital stories, and uploaded those to iTunesU for sharing with our classmates. The videos’ availability apparently hasn’t carried over in iTunes from one semester to the next, though, so I’ve uploaded my digital story – which addresses media and copyright – to my domain for viewing.