Wednesday, July 09, 2008

Classroom 2.0

By way of Red Lion Reports and TaxProf, I've learned about, and am now pleased to rebroadcast, the following lecture:



Michael WeschDubbed “the explainer” by popular geek publication Wired because of his viral YouTube video that summarizes Web 2.0 in under five minutes, cultural anthropologist Michael Wesch brought his Web 2.0 wisdom to the University of Manitoba on June 17.

During his presentation, the Kansas State University professor breaks down his attempts to integrate Facebook, Netvibes, Diigo, Google Apps, Jott, Twitter, and other emerging technologies to create an education portal of the future.

“It’s basically an ongoing experiment to create a portal for me and my students to work online,” he explains. “We tried every social media application you can think of. Some worked, some didn’t.”

If you are pressed for time, you really should join the millions of viewers who have watched Wesch's famous video, Web 2.0 . . . The Machine is Us/ing Us.


I am delighted to see Jeff Kahn and Paul Caron embrace Michael Wesch's work. I've been a fan for a long time, as I explained in Law 2.0 and The cathedral and the bazaar. Appreciation for Web 2.0 and its educational potential inspired my most recent participatory project, The Cardinal Lawyer II: Birds of a Feather (as explained on my official blog, The Cardinal Lawyer.

Here's the upshot: If you work in education, it's high time that you learn as much as you can about blogs, wikis, social networking sites, folksonomies, and widgets. Terms such as CSS, JSON, XML, XHTML, HTML, RSS, Atom, and Flash shouldn't be alien to you. Our students, after all, already know about rich user experience, user participation, dynamic content, metadata, web standards, scalability, openness, freedom, and collective intelligence. If we want to keep up, we'll have to learn. The payoff for learning? Better teaching.

1 Comments:

Blogger Maurizio said...

Jim:

Thanks for making this amazing video available. It makes me sad to no longer be in the classroom.

Maury Landsman

7/10/2008 4:45 PM  

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