Web 2.0 – For So Much More Than Publishing

The second version of the web has given us a voice that we never had in the past. We now have a platform that we can use to publish and voice our opinions to the world. We may be getting used to this, but it is still pretty amazing if we step back and think about the reach that we have now that we didn’t have only a few years ago.

Many classrooms and schools have taken advantage of this and are producing a lot of stuff online. Classrooms have blogs and wikis, voicethread accounts as well as youtube channels and flickr accounts to show what happens inside of their learning spaces. This makes the learning process and the classroom itself much more transparent than it ever has been in the past and is a powerful thing.

But I think we’re missing out.

This is still a one way web; only this time, it’s beginning with us and moving out to “them,” who ever they may be.

2.0 technologies give us opportunities for true collaboration and understanding. They give us opportunities to see things and talk to people in places we would never otherwise have access to. Live calls on Skype bringing experts into our classrooms are becoming more common. Using Moodle or Opera based chatrooms, allowing our students safe access to people in other parts of the world in real time gives them a window they have never had. Using a Ning in your classroom gives students a chance to publish, but also argue and think through issues in an online space that may be populated by people from other cultures or nations.

I think it is important that we deliberately place the students in our classrooms in the way of information and opportunities for them to be challenged by people and ideas that are different from their own. This can happen through live connections or through the reading and RSS feeds that we assign to them. The more channels the better, the stronger the network forged will become.

Web 2.0 technologies allow us to think about moving the latest, most up to date informtion both in to and out of our classrooms, but we also need to think more dynamically about the connections we are able to make, the networks we can forge and the people we can have the students in our classrooms meet.