Janine’s blog

Web 2.0 at ACEC 2006

At ACEC 2006 recently there were a couple of presentations about Web 2.0 which provided some up to date thinking on where things are at from the point of view of considerations for an education system in adapting to such rapidly evolving technology developments.

Kathy Schrock gave a very practical introduction and overview that included key references and a list of current tools for consideration in an educational context. Refer to the conference abstract and paper  or  summary on her website

Another presentation by Ken Price focussed on key issues for education. In his usual thought provoking way and humourous way, Ken supplemented his paper with some interesting “this could happen to you too” examples. Refer to the conference abstract or read the paper.

Lots of people involved in providing services on behalf of education systems are pondering how best to respond to these developments in order to harness the possibilities in a safe and secure way for young learners.

Picture Australia and Flickr

An interesting example of an “older” online service that is tapping into the reality of uptake of Web 2.0 tools is the initiative of Picture Australia. Picture Australia aims to build a collection of Australian images. Recognising the popularity of Flickr, the online image sharing and management service, they have set up two tags on Flickr - “Australia Day” and “Australia: People, places and events”. They encourage people to use these flags when adding their images to Flickr. Picture Australia then uses these tags to add the images to their collection.

On the Flickr site, you can view all the Australia day images and all those tagged as  people, places and events

I am not sure yet of the mechanism for Picture Ausrtalia making use of this in their database (I am investigating this).

So, they continue with their core business of building a collection of Australian images but are leveraging off an activity that has great popularity with general users of the web. Food for thought….

Education case studies

This article illustrates one teacher’s experiences in this space (thanks Paul for this reference) http://www.techlearning.com/shared/printableArticle.jhtml?articleID=193200296