Web 2.0, Web 1.0 and the Classroom

 I'm honing a new workshop and polishing my grad school class at Chestnut Hill College in Philadelphia and both have a similar content - emerging technologies/Web 2.0 for the classroom. Also starting to think about an update to my book (which is more than a year away because of research, editing, and publishing.)  And also thinking more about Web 1.0 - how we would all accumulate lists of resources and share them and have students find them.  I'd taught a number of workshops in the past providing lists of links for teachers and the invariable question would be "what do I do with these?" and many of us would come up with scavenger hunts or Web quests and virtual field trips, etc.  All creative uses of what we had - which was the hyperlinked Web.

But the exponential, interactive nature of what there is now is so far beyond anything that was then.  

Last year during the grad school class we started out thinking about podcasts and Wikis and blogs and RSS feeds and tagging and by the end of the class everyone was coming in to show new things none of us had even seen yet - (which we all know about now) - like Twitter and PageFlakes and SecondLife and Classroom2.0.  So what are we going to see this time around?  The exponential growth of Web 2.0 applications is astounding - not yet to the growth of hardware a la Moore - but quite amazing and shows no sign of stopping.  McLuhan said when there is great change, it's the artists who really understand it as it's happening - and I know educators are artists - so I really look forward to hearing from my colleagues and grad students about new Web 2.0 developments.