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Web 2.0 Tools
Wikis, Blogs & More, Oh My!
4/1/2008
At Grand Rapids Community College, technologists have turned to similar technologies for different purposes. For students, the school recently started using Viddler, a Microsoft .NET tool that enables users to embed comments and captions in videos broadcast over the school's YouTube channel. As others watch videos that have been "Viddled," textbased comments emerge from the moving images just like the bubble quotes on VH1's Pop-up Video show.
While this might not seem collaborative on the surface, Eric Kunnen, coordinator of instructional technologies, says students have taken full advantage of the tool, embedding insights and other suggestions for peers who view the same videos down the road.
Kunnen and the IT staff at Grand Rapids also have implemented Web 2.0 tools to facilitate collaboration among faculty. Here, in a professional development class that educates classroom professors about teaching online, instructors use the social bookmarking features of the Bb Scholar tool from Blackboard to share links and build a repository around best practices.
"The ability to tag resources instead of e-mailing them to each other is incredibly collaborative and time-saving," says Kunnen. "While we can't yet determine that it's improving our professional development, it certainly is making the exchange of information easier among those who take the classes."
Importantly, a new Web 2.0 tool from Microsoft incorporates the best of all these approaches. The tool, known as Popfly, facilitates the creation of "mashups," which are constructs that let users work together to combine data from different sources. In fact, collaboration is the whole idea behind Popfly: Think open source, only with tiny programs for a website. Once users have created these constructs, they are encouraged to share them with other users all over the world in the form of "blocks."
Such was the case at Bentley College, where Mark Frydenberg, senior lecturer and a software specialist in the Computer Information Systems department, recently introduced the tool to some of his computer science classes. One Frydenberg assignment directed students to create mashups that used certain data analysis functionalities that hadn't been covered in class (in an example for the class, Frydenberg himself created a mashup that replaced postal state abbreviations with states' full names). The twist: Instead of developing brand-new mashups, students were tasked to look outside the Bentley universe and build variations on other mashups that general-interest users had built themselves.
"Basically, for the purposes of this assignment, they all had the benefit of someone else's work," says Frydenberg, who notes that perhaps the only downside of Popfly is that it does not allow two people to edit the same thing at the same time. "In some classrooms [building on top of others' work] might be construed as cheating; in mine, the act of collaborating with others was precisely the point."
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
