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Web 2.0 Tools
Wikis, Blogs & More, Oh My!
4/1/2008
The Web 2.0-Enabled Portal
ANY SCHOOL CAN EMBRACE individual Web 2.0 tools to enhance student collaboration. At Georgetown University (DC), however, technologists recently invested in a slew of them, and brought all of the tools together under one portal designed to serve students in myriad ways.
The portal, dubbed Digital Commons and currently in beta phase, offers nine different Web 2.0 resources: blogs, wikis, electronic portfolios, forums, podcasts, posters, timelines, research, and dStories (multimedia narratives with video, audio, and images).
Eddie Maloney, managing director of the university's Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship, says the site boasts two important components: the tools themselves and a "scaffold" that explains to users how to incorporate the technologies into their everyday lives. Ultimately, he notes, the goal is to familiarize users with Web 2.0 tools early, and to such a degree that collaboration with the technologies becomes second nature. After all, "What good is a car without an instruction manual and a road map?" he asks. "The more our users are exposed to these tools, the more they'll use them."
Down the road, Maloney says Georgetown has even bigger plans to create what he calls a Digital Notebook-an integrated space designed to store all the work students produce while they're at the university. He likens this project to the digital version of the 1980s Trapper Keeper notebook, adding that it will facilitate collaboration by allowing others to review and provide feedback at will. While aspects of the Digital Commons are live today, Maloney says it could be four or five years before the Digital Notebook is up and running.
Other Tools
Wikis aren't the only Web 2.0 tools to aid collaboration in higher education; technologists at two- and four-year schools are finding value in a number of other technology products, as well. Take Lake Superior College, a member of the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities system. There, VP of Technology and the Virtual Campus Barry Dahl recently has embraced Zoho Writer, an online word processing and virtual office tool from AdventNet, to enable collaboration among colleagues and students alike. Zoho works a lot like Google Docs: Users can log on from anywhere in the world and read, review, and edit documents simultaneously. And according to Dahl, Lake Superior professors are using the tool to facilitate student collaboration without the endless passing around of Microsoft Word documents-a practice that creates versioning nightmares and turns many students off to the idea of working in groups.
"It's great if I like it and even better if our educators like it, but more than anything, we want technologies that appeal to students," Dahl says. "At the end of the day, if a tool isn't something our students are going to embrace, after a year or two we're going to move on to something else. They're the users who drive everything."
Recommended Reading
- 2008 Campus Technology Innovators: Enhanced Learning/ Assessment
- 2008 Campus Technology Innovators: High-Performance Computing
- 2008 Campus Technology Innovators: Interactive, Remote Learning
- 2008 Campus Technology Innovators: Mobile Learning
- 2008 Campus Technology Innovators: Network Security
- 2008 Campus Technology Innovators: Social Networking for Admissions
