The Why 2 of Web 2.0 - my take...

Today I had the opportunity to attend a professional learning session titled "The Why 2 or Web 2.0" in Sydney. In general the session had an audience consisting of a very large number of teacher librarians with a nice even spread of primary and secondary representatives. More information and takes on the next episode of the EdTechCrew.

The presenters today were:

• Will Richardson (Educator and Writer) Blog - Wiki
• Westley Field - Director of Skoolaborate
• Judy O'Connell - Head, Library and Information Services, St Joseph's College
• Christine Mackenzie - CEO Yarra Plenty Regional Library

Will talk about the idea of looking through a lens for this presentation - as a parent (his perspective) He indicated that he has very few answers but has a number of very good questions.

Will talked about the idea everyone with a mobile phone with a camera is know really a journalist - report, and can use there networks to distribute ideas and stories. A direct example occurred in Sydney yesterday where there was a shooting at Star City casino where a person was shot twice. Channel 10 news ran the story and used good quality images from above the crime scene taken by a member of the public.

An interesting stat to come out of the presentation was that IBM internally have 26,000 blogs and that the company whats to get employees to share their knowledge and ideas. Things are changing around the read write web.

The use of social networking sites to do things differently - the story of a student that passed away at his old school and within a few hours a site was set up in memory of the deceased student and people came to share there stories and memories of this person - within a very short time 400 people we members of this page. Students using these tools in fundamentally different ways than what adults would think off.

A few books talked about that I am planning to check out include:

• Here Comes Everybody - Clay Shirky see you tube video on his thoughts here...
• The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual
• Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything (Unabridged)
• The World is Flat
• The Book is Dead (Long live the Book) - Sherman Young

Will talked about the ideas that there are lots of kids that do not have access to go instruction on say biology - we should be teaching them to find and locate this information/content. We should then be enabling these students to create networks with others and collaborate around the idea of biology. The fact that these networks could be located anywhere in the world should really not matter.

We need to talk about how we educate our children to find information not to remember information because it is contained in a test - we need to teach them how to find information, how to validate and confirm information and how to share that information and make the best use of it for the task or activity at hand.

Teach students and teachers to read contextually online - being able to read and write hyper textually is a key skill to develop

A great wikipedia story from the presentation - a student did a bit of work on an assignment (fairly rubbishy) then posted it onto wikipedia and watched as others put information and details in to make it a very good assignment. Although he got a poor mark for his work (which was really not his) he should have received and A for the thinking and application to get the required information in such a creative way.

Wesley Field talked about online environments and the 2007 Horizon report.

Showed an example of a new $15M building that will be built at MLC in Sydney for the Junior school- he showed on screen a second life virtual representation of the new building that was constructed by a 17 year old student that has allowed teachers and others to explore the environment and look at the furniture and colour schemes. A really great application - more importantly was the fact that a student was engaged in building this and that this virtual representation was able to help the designers as well.

Wesley then went onto sow an empty shopping centre that could be used by students to do research and build their own shops and look at the development and growth of shops - layout, costs, business models and a whole range of other areas. A very powerful idea and one that would enable amazing opportunities for students.

I found myself in the sessions doing what our students would do, I had my laptop connected to the Internet and when I was not developing ideas around what I was hearing or looking at sites that have been mentioned I would drift off and follow up other ideas - although it may have looked like I was not paying attention - I was but doing it my way in a multi modal way.

Overall a good day - some of the presenters lacked a little direction in their message and one seemed to meander a little but otherwise a great day all up.

Good to meet you Chris and all those others I met.