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Wikis and Blogs and Pods, Oh My!!

  • Wikis
    1. What – is a type of website that allows the visitors themselves to easily add, remove and otherwise edit and change some available content, sometimes without the need for registration. This ease of interaction and operation makes a wiki an effective tool for collaborative authoring. The term wiki can also refer to the collaborative software itself (wiki engine) that facilitates the operation of such a website, or to certain specific wiki sites, including the computer science site (an original wiki), WikiWikiWeb, and online encyclopedias such as Wikipedia  (from Wikipedia)

    2. Why – Because many heads are better than one, because collaborative writing is more exciting and rewarding, because you can encourage participation by group members, because you can have a historical record and electronic paper trail of the work you’ve done, and because you can easily share your results.

    3. Who – Students for group projects, committees on campus, campus communications, lecture notes or presentations, or anything else that you want to put on a Web page.

    4. Where – Lots of free sites or host your own on campus: PBwiki, WikiSpaces, WetPaint, etc.  MediaWiki is open source and you can host your own if desired.

    5. How – Set up a free account, follow their tutorial for web formatting (if needed), invite others to participate, start writing and publishing.


  • Podcasting

    1. What – Podcasting, a portmanteau of Apple's "iPod" and "broadcasting", is a method of publishing files to the Internet, allowing users to subscribe to a feed and receive new files automatically by subscription, usually at no cost. It first became popular in late 2004, used largely for audio files. (from Wikipedia)

    2. Why – Another means of communication, don’t eliminate other forms of communication, but add this to the arsenal. If faculty want to post podcasts of their lectures, let them! Encourage them! Enable them! They can use class time for much more productive things.

    3. Who – Almost everybody. See Apple iTunes University for Stanford and Berkley and others. See university consortiums for hosting podcasts non-commercially. Example - Ed Tech Talk 

    4. Where – More sites than you can shake a stick at. Use a blog to deliver the podcasts.
    5. How – Buy a microphone (USB plug is best). Select a hosting site. Start talking. (Better yet, pick a theme, design a plan of attack, and then start publishing a series of coordinated, interesting podcasts.)

  • Social Bookmarking

    1. What – Social bookmarking is an activity performed over a computer network that allows users to save and categorize (see folksonomy) a personal collection of bookmarks and share them with others. Users may also take bookmarks saved by others and add them to their own collection, as well as to subscribe to the lists of others. - a personal knowledge management tool  (from Wikipedia)

    2. Why – Because sharing your stuff (like search results) is good. Even if you don’t share, being able to access your links from any Internet connection and being able to search or filter your own results are also good things.

    3. Who – Bloggers, researchers, students in group projects, anyone who looks for and finds useful stuff on the Internet. Everyone talks about Internet SEARCH. We don’t want to search, we want to FIND, and then we want to find it again when we need it.

    4. Where – del.icio.us and furl.net are two of my favorites
    5. How – Create free account. Drag and drop the free buttons to your browser bar (not required, but makes it easier to use the tool), start searching and finding, bookmark it and TAG IT.  (Using del.icio.us in Education)

  • RSS: Rich Site Summary (a.k.a. Really Simple Syndication)
    1. What – RSS is a simple XML-based system that allows users to subscribe to their favorite websites. Using RSS, webmasters can put their content into a standardized format, which can be viewed and organized through RSS-aware software or automatically conveyed as new content on another website. A program known as a feed reader or aggregator can check a list of feeds on behalf of a user and display any updated articles that it finds. It is common to find web feeds on major websites and many smaller ones. (from Wikipedia)  (Stephen Downes explanation)

    2. Why – Because you want people to find your content without too much effort. Because you prefer to have the newspaper delivered to your door, rather than have to go to the store to buy it. The 3 Purposes of RSS (from eelearning)

    3. Who – Everybody who provides any kind of content. You use RSS feeds all the time without realizing it. Now you can let RSS work for you as well by pushing out your content to those who want to receive it. Also, this is the most efficient way to get, to organize, and to read the things that you want to read. These are called RSS aggregators (or feed aggregators).

    4. Where – RSS code is typically a built-in feature of the web tools such as blogs, wikis, and podcasts. For your own gathering and reading, there are several tools although I use and recommend Bloglines.
    5. How – If you are broadcasting your content via blogs or podcasts (etc.), just make sure that you have enabled RSS feeds in your settings. If you are gathering content to consume, go to Bloglines.com and create a free account. Get their free browser buttons if you want to make it really easy. Start reading.


  • Web Office Tools
    1. What – Web-enabled programs that mimic Microsoft Office.

    2. Why – If you are interested in posting your office software output to the web, Microsoft files don’t do that well. These tools do enable that, plus you can allow other people to edit (or not), and because they are free. You can access your documents from any Internet connection.

    3. Who – Open enrollment.

    4. Where – Zoho.com, Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Windows Live and several others.
    5. How – Create a free account. Create files from scratch or most allow you to upload Microsoft files (.doc, .ppt, .xls) and use them in the web-based program and still export it back with a Microsoft file extension.


  • Online Video
    1. What – Web-enabled video clips.

    2. Why – Because if a picture is worth a 1000 words then a video must be worth at least that.  Because this is all the rage. You don’t want to be left out of the rage, do you?

    3. Who – Just about everybody.

    4. Where – Several sites, but the most popular are YouTube and Blip.tv
    5. How – You do have to be able to create a digital video using a digital video camera or by editing video on your computer. However, once you have the video footage, then it is simple to upload the file to the video service where they convert it into flash for easy web viewing and they give you the HTML code if you want to embed your video in other places (web pages).


  • Portal Pages
    1. Option #1: Google IG - http://www.google.com/ig
    2. Option #2: Pageflakes - http://www.pageflakes.com
    3. Option #3: Netvibes -  http://www.netvibes.com


  • Web Polls
    1. Poll Daddy:  http://polldaddy.com/default.asp  (Examples)
    2. Zoho Poll:  http://zohopolls.com
    3. Vizu.com -  http://www.vizu.com  
    4. Neomyz.com (a few free ones) - http://neomyz.com


  • Fun Stuff
    1. Pandora Music (based on the Music Genome Project): http://pandora.com
    2. Bitty Browser (picture in picture on a webpage): http://www.bitty.com
    3. Hellodeo:  http://hellodeo.com/hello
    4. Web 2.0 or Star Wars Quiz


  • More Sources of Info
    1. TechCrunch Blog
    2. Sacred Cow Dung
    3. Dion Hinchcliffe's The State of Web 2.0 Blog

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