Web 2.0 in Education

Today I ran across (via David Warlick’s 2 Cents Worth blog) a web presentation by Ewan McIntosh entitled Web 2.0 in Education. It’s a large file…don’t try it at home…but does an incredible job of answering how and why blogging or podcasting or skype or any of the Web 2.0 technologies are important and perhaps essential for the way teaching needs to happen in this day and age.

The basic premise of these new tools is that users…students…are no longer simply reading the web. It’s not a one way street like it used to be. Users can create content with such ease that they become authors, authorities perhaps, and gain the attention of the millions of people who are online.

And what happens when millions (maybe not that many) of people are looking at your work? Well, your motivation to do well increases…I mean, you don’t want to look stupid, do you? What about those ideas of yours…do you have facts or sources to back them up? Have you fleshed them out enough to defend them to someone whose ideas are different?  Students revisit their work, revise it, hash it out, think about it.  Now there’s a concept.