Web 2.0

One Great Example of Using Web 2.0 For Education

In the Ed Tech circles, we talk a lot about the potential for new online tools in promoting education, but sometimes come up short on exact examples. We have plenty examples of how to use online tools in a class, but sometimes we don’t look at using tools to promote the bigger picture in education. For example, creating sites that provide free resources for teachers.

So, here is one example. I am sure there are many more out there. Promotion of sites like these is an issue, because promotion takes money. Here is my effort to promote one – Free-reading.net (an ongoing, collaborative, teacher-based, curriculum-sharing project):

Free-Reading is an “open source” instructional program that helps teachers teach early reading. Because it’s open source, it represents the collective wisdom of a wide community of teachers and researchers. It’s designed to contain a scope and sequence of activities that can support and supplement a typical “core” or “basal” program.

The interesting thing about Free-reading.net is that the site is built on MediaWiki – the same tool that runs Wikipedia. Reading the About page also shows that they are following the same philosophy as Wikipedia – anyone is free to use it or contribute to it.

I am hoping that one day we will see more sites like this out there. And that we will also see those that are out there become well known.

(Follow-up) Google Investing in Facebook?

(As my Dad would say…) I’m not one to say I told you so, but…

The tech and investment worlds are abuzz as Google and Microsoft battle it out to see who will get to invest a significant chunk of change in Facebook. (Read more here.) We should find out in the next day, but according to the article, all indications point to Google moving in on this extremely popular social networking site.

Zoho’s Online vs. Offline Office Comparison

A few weeks ago I noticed a mistake I was constantly making: I would forget to follow what is going on with Zoho, and then they would release a whole slew of improvements and updates on me. Silly EduGeek. So, I added Zoho Blog to my RSS feeds and decided to keep in the know.

I am really glad I did – and I recommend you do the same. Not only do they keep you up-to-date on their newest online office applications (which I still consider them the leader in, even though Google is a close second), but they do some great posting on web-based applications in general. Some of their posts would even make great fodder for a company or school district technology policy meeting. You know what I mean – the one where you are trying to convince your co-workers to finally come out of the 90s and into the Web 2.0 world, and they are terrified to leave their safe desktop cage.

Take a recent post for example: Office vs Online Office : Telephone vs Mobile Phone. Raju Vegesna makes a great case for the differences between online office applications and offline desktop office programs by comparing them to mobile phones and wired telephones (respectively).

The great thing about the Zoho blog is that they don’t hide things or give you imaginary marketing fluff like I’ve noticed other sites do. They are even very honest about their limitations.

Of course, this post got me thinking about what my job could be like if I could go mobile. Or what a classroom on my campus could be like if it goes mobile. Hmmm……

The Buzz on Buzzword

I mentioned Buzzword in my last Web 2.0 post: a new Flash-based word processing website that was recently purchased by Adobe. I had to sign on to a waiting list to get a user account. That user account arrived a few days later, and I can now give my first impressions of Buzzword.

The first thing I have to say – I hate the hype they are using with Buzzword: “The first real web-based word processor.” But then they don’t say (as far as I can tell) what they mean by “real” – and I can’t think of a good guess either. Google Docs and Zoho seem pretty real to me. Just like Microsoft Word, they use a mark-up language and text combined with some graphics to give the appearance of words typed on a piece of paper. None of it is technically real until you print it.

Also, at the exact point I was reading “don’t have to worry about crashes, viruses, versioning, losing connectivity or navigating away from the page” in the sample document they give you to play with… it all stopped working. No buttons worked, the scroll bar stopped moving – everything. Funny.

That highlights one of the weaknesses of Buzzword – it uses Flash. Flash doesn’t work evenly across all computers. For animations – it works great. But making applications with Flash is tricky – it sometimes gets bogged down and freezes up for no apparent reason. Not to mention you have to download and install a plug-in for Flash – something not all educators have access to.

The lack of font choice is also annoying – I don’t even recognize the names of 4 of the 6 that you get. Of course, font use is really a weakness of any online word processor. The killer app to me, for online word processing, is figuring out how to get websites to recognize what fonts you have installed locally, and then offer those to you.

Of course, Buzzword is Flash-based, and everything moves more like an animation than a choppy AJAX program. The look and feel is really nice and professional. Buzzword can also do some nice things that other websites can’t for now – like add comments, or spell check on any browser. Of courses, there are also the requisite sharing options.

I just still can’t help but worry about the fact that it is all in Flash. Not the best option for education. AJAX can be designed to degrade well. Flash just doesn’t degrade. Don’t get me wrong – I love Flash. I’ve done my fair share of Flash design. Because of that, I know that it’s usefulness in this type of situation is questionable. But there is promise here.

Online Publication Competition Heats Up

Maybe Google was on to something? And not mention other front runners such as Zoho and Writely (which was purchased by Google)? Many recent articles and blogs have highlighted how Microsoft, IBM, and Adobe are entering in to the online publication world. This can be good and bad for the world of education.

First of all, if you aren’t totally familiar with what is going on, PC World has a good article that summarizes the recent happenings. Here’s the basics: Adobe purchased Buzzword, a Flash-based online Word processor. IBM released Lotus Symphony, an open-source Office-like program based on OpenOffice.org software. Some speculate that they will connect this with some online service at some point. Microsoft released Office Live Workspace, a place for Office users to store documents online, allowing users to download and share collaborative documents. Even though, to be fair, Zoho (see Zoho Projects) and others has been offering stuff like this for a while.

Now, if you are like me, the Microsoft Office Live Workspace is just, well, meh. I hate to use a cliché word like ‘meh,’ but that best describes it. Just a password protected place to store documents online? I can rent webspace for $20 a year and do the same thing. Nice try, Microsoft – but I still don’t think you get Web2.0 yet.

I really wanted to turn this post into a review of all the new options, but I sadly can’t. Buzzword is not accepting new users right now – you can sign up to be on the wait list. Still waiting. They say they are the first real Online Word Processor. That’s just arrogant. Being in Flash might give them an edge over AJAX-based stuff like Google Docs, but you guys still aren’t the first real one. Writely, Zoho, and a host of others are still technically real.

I’ve tried to try out Lotus Symphony, but it is the freakiest experience I have had so far. I had to installed a Java applet just to download it (?!?). A lot of options came up after that that I wasn’t comfortable with. Installing the whopping 140mb file that downloaded on my computer was twisted and complex – and I know some complex programming techniques and languages. If I ever get this figured out, maybe I’ll write a review. I don’t see more than a few really patient people (more patient than me) getting in to this one.

So how is this good and bad for education? Well, the heat up in competition shows that free online applications are the next big thing. Free is always good for education. The bad for education? Well, this is all online. Good if you are at a school with relaxed filtering standards. Not so good if you are at a school with a “filter Nazi” in charge of the IT department. Also – when you have so many companies re-creating the wheel – you have too many wheels to chose from, and none of them work together very well. Not to mention to many sites to track – or the fact that some sites claim rights to use (or even own) the content that you store there.

We’ll see where all of this leads. In my opinion, Zoho is still the best option for any online publishing needs.

How the Social Web Came To Be

These two online presentations popped up in my daily feeds. Just finished reading through them and thought you’d find them interesting. An in-depth look at the history of today’s social web.

Real-Time Search Comes to Twitter

Interesting news in micro-blogging. Twitter will soon release it’s newest feature — the ability to search in real-time for key words and get results from recent twitter posts. (Read full ZDNet article here.) ZDNet notes that this will allow Twitter to become “the ultimate buzz tracker for those who are interested in what’s being talked about at any given moment in time”. The journalist in me is excited about being able to see exactly what real people worldwide are saying about real events. Definitely an interesting development…. I just wish Jaiku would step up. (IMHO, Jaiku’s just a better tool — it’s cleaner, easier, and does/did more tricks. But that’s another blog post.)

NoteSake: Taking Notes in Class Goes Web2.0

<oldGeezerVoice:on>Back in my day, we had to take notes offline. If we wanted to share them with other people, we had to put them in an email or on a flash drive, and then hope that it didn’t get lost in the process. That was the way that it was, and we liked it. We had to buy expensive programs like Microsoft Office just to get something else other than basic text typing. Sure – there was OpenOffice, but no one was brave enough to go open source. And if Office crashed on us, and couldn’t recover our notes – we had to re-type all of them. And we liked it.<oldGeezerVoice:off>

Hard to believe, but the cutting edge way we used to take notes just five years ago is becoming a thing of the past. Take NoteSake for example: a site designed specifically for college students, so that they can take notes online, organize those notes, work as groups, or even share notes with others.

Of course, you will need to be in a classroom that allows notebook computers and has wireless access. Many schools are getting set up this way, but there are always those fussy professors that have a problem with students bringing notebooks to class.

The pros about NoteSake are the organization and the sharing. You organize with tags, just like at other Web2.0 sites. So, create tags for each class, or even each unit in each class, and find your notes fast. Work in groups easily, or share notes with other students that might have been sick.

I also like that you can download notes as PDF or Word docs. I would probably do that on a daily basis, just for security. Websites do crash from time to time after all.

Also, with direction that the iPhone is taking mobile web access, sites like this will take mobile learning to a whole new level. Even though typing notes on an iPhone might prove difficult, someday someone will come up with the perfect solution for that, and students of the future will only need to come to class with a cell phone. Amazing.

The downside is that this is a stand-alone site. What would make it killer would be to add organizational tools like a calendar. Or, if someone like Google would buy this site and integrate it into their services… or even if Moodle would integrate with this – that would be killer.

Presentations come to Google Docs

Google announced yesterday that they’ve added the ability to create/share/upload presentations using their Google Docs online application. While they’ll have to compete with established online presentation sites such as ZohoShow and Slideshare.net, Google is quickly becoming a viable alternative to Microsoft Office. Should Bill, Steve, and company be worried? I think so.



Read a review of options currently found (and missing) from Google Presentations.

What Growing Up with Google May Mean to Graduate Education

Occasionally, something interesting will come through the university’s Staff mailing list. Late last week, someone sent us a link to the Council of Graduate Schools‘ recent publication “What Growing Up with Google May Mean to Graduate Education“. I’m currently reading through it, and it’s just too interesting to keep to myself. Much discussion on the changes in learning/teaching methodology and learner expectations. Interesting read!