Category Archives for web20

Who’s Afraid of Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and the Big Bad CMS.

Yet another great video, Institutional Fear, presented at the 2008 ELI Educause Conference in the Fear 2.0 digi-drama session “Who’s Afraid of Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and the Big Bad CMS?” Session Abstract:

Web 2.0 tools have the power to transform education. Such a transformation requires that faculty, students, and institutions take risks. With those risks comes fear, which is often unarticulated. How do you tackle this fear and make real change? (Join us to face this fear together in a multimedia, interactive miniplay).

The four discussion-provoking videos in the session were created and presented by faculty and staff at the University of California, the University of Texas, the University of Mary Washington, Bryn Mawr College, Oberlin College, and Middlebury College.

For a look at pedagogy and practice, interested faculty might also want to read “Wikis and Podcasts and Blogs! Oh, My! What Is a Faculty Member to Do?” from last fall’s Connect.

In the meantime, enjoy “Institutional Fear”… Do You Fear It?

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A Vision of Students Today: By, Students.

If we begin to explore the issues and causes of stagnation in education, the students and the student experience are both central to the discussion. What is the student experience of the classical models of education that exist today? In what ways are today’s students unique, different from the past? Where can we get an insider look? How about a group of 200 Kansas State University students who made a YouTube video on the subject…
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Last fall, Professor of Cultural Anthropology Michael Wesh collaborated with 200 students who surveyed themselves and created this video summarizing “some of the most important characteristics of students today - how they learn, what they need to learn, their goals, hopes, dreams, what their lives will be like, and what kinds of changes they will experience in their lifetime”:

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What say you? Feel free to respond in the comments!

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Web 2.0 or Fear 2.0: Are We Stagnating?

time_large.jpgTravel back two years in time, way back to 2006. The read/write web, or “Web 2.0″ (also synonymous with “connection, collaboration, and individual expression”), had finally attracted enough mainstream attention for Time magazine to name “You” Person of the Year in their year-in-review January ‘07 issue. While the explosion of the read/write web has grown quickly from its humble beginnings, this rising tide of innovation (and opportunity) isn’t slowing, isn’t going to go any slower, and certainly shows no signs of stopping.

Have we caught up with Fair Use, the DMCA, and copyright law? Do we understand these changes, or do we fear them? Do we leverage this new revolution? How about inside the “hallowed halls of our institutions of higher education and learning”? Are we adapting? Or are we stagnating? The following short video was presented at the 2008 ELI Educause conference and more poignantly calls attention to some of these issues:

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Digital Natives Survey: Instructional Technology in College Courses

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Reading the Digital Natives blog as I usually do, I stumbled on an interesting post regarding a survey the group just completed about student opinions and experiences on the usefulness of instructional technology in college courses.

The survey covers all the latest technologies, from simply posting an interactive digital syllabus (with links to resources) to recorded lectures, podcasting, videos, blogs, wikis, and course websites. The overall responses were largely positive, with students who have actually been exposed to and thus used these technologies in their courses giving higher positive ratings to them than those who have not.

Rather than try to summarize it here, I suggest reading the post and viewing the report they have kindly posted for download at the end.

To learn more about the Digital Natives academic research team, visit their wiki pages.

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Hulu: Watch NBC online, Embed TV Shows on Your Blog or Myspace Page

Hulu came out of its private beta a week or two ago, and now anyone can access the site. As a private beta tester, I had been catching up with episodes of The Office ever since the series left iTunes, which I am still not happy about. I’d much rather watch these episodes on my iPhone during my commute, and the unfortunate part about Hulu is that it doesn’t offer TV shows for download. Instead, you are stuck watching them in streaming video on your computer complete with, yes, advertiser commercials.

However, the site’s layout and design is pretty user friendly, and the most ingenious aspect of Hulu (and the most fun) is that you can grab the embed code for an entire TV show, or even just a clip that you create, and embed it anywhere you want. Giving fans, viewers, and users the ability to do this without having to rip the content themselves is certainly a plus for most of us, and for NBC, who doesn’t want to see unauthorized, copyright protected clips on YouTube and elsewhere on the web. It appears that Hulu has decided not to fight the tide on this one. The commercials come with the clips when you embed them (a boon to Hulu and its advertisers), and when viewing one of their videos on a blog or elsewhere, double-clicking it brings you back to Hulu’s site (as in YouTube’s model). I’d highly prefer viewing without the commercials of this were ever a possibility, and I’d still like to see the ability to download entire episodes (without DRM) and remix the clips. Still, the functionality Hulu is providing its users is a step in the right direction.

Sadly I can’t get it to work here, but I’ve tried it elsewhere and it’s working in most places. Pretty cool!

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