At my work we’ve begun a little informal, Friday lunch hour meeting called TechTank (or maybe Tech Tank? I need to ask Frank), during which people are encouraged to have lunch with us and chat about educational applications of technology. Participants tend to range from faculty comfortable with Blackboard and e-mail to people like me who do the under-the-hood setup. This week Frank sent out a note that we’d be talking about Moodle and we got our biggest turnout yet (disenchantment with Blackboard appears to be growing). I gave a glossy overview of how we use Moodle in my shop, its features, and its limitations (seriously, that’s some ugly code, even for PHP’s standards). It’s not perfect, but for what I need to do right now it’s working pretty well. I think it’s here to stay.
Anyway, I think the fact that we had a feature toward the end people made suggestions about future topics. A definition of Web 2.0 was a hot one. I responded with my favorite quick explanation (”the read/write web”) and someone else said she’s used the term web gadgets to encapsulate the likes of Flickr, YouTube, del.icio.us, wikis, and the like. That’s a pretty good starting point, especially for the crowd we work with (even if it may cause confusion down the road with Vista’s like-named functionality in Windows, which is just another rehash of widgets already available in OS X, Yahoo!, and elsewhere). The question, now, is how to get our audience to become active users of these sites, or at least understand that they need at least a conversational understanding of what social networking means if they want to continue to seem relevant to students.
Speaking of Web 2.0, here’s a rather compelling why-this-is-a-big-deal video via YouTube. It’s already made the rounds, but I’ll share it as well–even if it came from a guy at K-State, of all places.
