My top tools for education:
Blogs – As the book notes, can be a very effective tool in the classroom and for individuals who are journaling their learning. As a community enterprise (the ability for it to be public and have people interact by commenting on the posts as well as link to them from other sites) is a fantastic feature. If I had a setting of ongoing classes (I teach one-time workshops, so I don’t have opportunity to pursue some of these longer-term methods at this time, though I would like to teach online at some point), I would incorporate blogs.
RSS – Blogs can be effectively used in combination with RSS – a class could setup an RSS feed to their classmates blogs and then check one place for updates. (Unlike a wiki setting where you have to click on each page to see the updates, or get email notices each time, at least as far as I have experienced. Enlighten me if I am off-base here.) If you use Google Reader, you can use that to consolidate your feeds into one place and it’s a nice format.
YouTube – popular and well-known; also has an education site where schools can brand their pages and post videos. I think having students creating videos or share links to applicable videos could be a useful exercise in some settings. Videos can also be embedded in other sites (such as a blog), so would incorporate multimedia but without the students having to log into numerous sites for viewing/commenting.
Delicious - a social networking site. I recommend trying it out and start experimenting with assigning 'tags' to your bookmarks. It took me a little time to get accustomed to doing that as I have a hard time being consistent with my tags such that I can pull up related topics under one tag. But the more I do it, the better I become.
One benefit: you can access your bookmarks in delicious from anywhere, e.g. you are not limited to your one computer/browser.Another benefit: you can share your bookmarks with others as well as access other people's bookmarks.
For a class assignment, an idea would be to have everyone go out and find online resources/sites related to a specific topic and bookmark them (tag them) in their delicious site. You can then share the ideas that were tagged the same and everyone can benefit- easy way to share online resources and it remains available and is accessible anytime you login to delicious (e.g. don't have to remember where that document was with all those great links from two classes ago. . .)< A personal use example: I create a tag/bookmark for all the links I access for this class and any related resources. I can view by links by class or by other tages (e.g. edcuation, teaching, methods, learningstyles, web2.0, etc.)
A few general resources about Web 2.0 and education:
If you haven’t yet, check out Barry Dahl’s blog about social media and FERPA: http://barrydahl.com/2011/02/15/ferpa-and-social-media-in-education/
And his resources page: http://barrydahl.com/resources/
He has a list of Web 2.0 tools: http://barrydahl.com/web-20/
Related readings:
I recommend the book Planet Google by Stross: http://books.google.com/books?id=xOk3EIUW9VgC&printsec=frontcover&dq=google&hl=en&ei=5MZvTbTUNJG2sAPtrO3DCw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CDYQ6AEwAjgU#v=onepage&q&f=false
I also enjoyed The Big Switch by Carr for the big picture of technology and society. http://www.nicholasgcarr.com/bigswitch/
Also of interest and somewhat related: NY Times series on computers and our brains:
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