When I first heard the term Web 2.0 several months ago, my first thought was "How can there be a Web 2.0? The Web isn't a software application that can be upgraded like Internet Explorer or Microsoft Word." Sure the browser that I use as my window to the Web can be upgraded but the Web itself? What's up with that? Where did this term originate? What exactly does it mean?
Bryan Alexander is Director for Research at the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education (NITLE). In an Educause review titled, "Web 2.0: A New Wave of Innovation for Teaching and Learning?", he states, "During the past few years, a group of Web projects and services became perceived as especially connective, receiving the rubric of “social software”: blogs, wikis, trackback, podcasting, videoblogs and enough social networking tools like MySpace and Facebook to give rise to an abbreviation mocking their very prevalence: YASN (Yet Another Social Network)."
So it is this new openess, this sociable two-way flow of information that defines the new version of the Web. Darren Barefoot, a technology writer in Vancouver, developed a head-to-head comparison between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0:
| Web 1.0 was about reading | Web 2.0 is about writing | |
| Web 1.0 was about companies | Web 2.0 is about communities | |
| Web 1.0 was about client-server | Web 2.0 is about peer to peer | |
| Web 1.0 was about HTML | Web 2.0 is about XML | |
| Web 1.0 was about home pages | Web 2.0 is about blogs | |
| Web 1.0 was about portals | Web 2.0 is about RSS | |
| Web 1.0 was about taxonomy | Web 2.0 is about tags |
In a paper titled, "Wikis, blogs and podcasts: a new generation of Web-based tools for virtual collaborative clinical practice and education," Maged N. Kamel Boulos, Inocencio Maramba and Steve Wheeler state:
We have witnessed a rapid increase in the use of Web-based "collaborationware" in recent years. These Web 2.0 applications, particularly wikis, blogs and podcasts, have been increasingly adopted by many online health-related professional and educational services. Because of their ease of use and rapidity of deployment, they offer the opportunity for powerful information sharing and ease of collaboration.
The following describes and defines some of these new Web 2.0 tools and provides links to free applications and additional articles that describe how the applications are being used in education today.
What is wiki and from whence did it come? Wikipedia tells us, "WikiWikiWeb was the first of such software to be called a wiki. Ward Cunningham started developing WikiWikiWeb in 1994 and installed it on Internet domain c2.com on March 25, 1995. It was named by Cunningham, who remembered a Honolulu International Airport counter employee telling him to take the so-called 'Wiki Wiki' Chance RT-52 shuttle bus line that runs between the airport's terminals. According to Cunningham, 'I chose wiki-wiki as an alliterative substitute for 'quick' and thereby avoided naming this stuff quick-web.' 'Wiki Wiki' is a reduplication of 'wiki', a Hawaiian-language word for fast.
From wiki.org: "Wiki is a piece of server software that allows users to freely create and edit Web page content using any Web browser. Wiki supports hyperlinks and has a simple text syntax for creating new pages and crosslinks between internal pages on the fly.
Wiki is unusual among group communication mechanisms in that it allows the organization of contributions to be edited in addition to the content itself.
Like many simple concepts, "open editing" has some profound and subtle effects on Wiki usage. Allowing everyday users to create and edit any page in a Web site is exciting in that it encourages democratic use of the Web and promotes content composition by nontechnical users.
Wikis
can be used in education to publish a simple web site, for group authoring
and project development with peer review. The
World Federation for Medical Education (WFME) is the global organization
concerned with medical education and training of medical doctors as well
as undergraduate students. It uses a wiki to document general information
about the organization, to set forth its structure, objectives, activities
and projects. Check out the links below to explore ways wikis are being
used in education and to find out how to make your own wiki.
- World Federation for Medical Education Wiki
- Using Wikis in Education
- The Medicine Portal from WikiPedia
- The Clinical Informatics Wiki
- PBWiki - making a wiki is as easy as making a peanut butter sandwich
- Wikia - offers free MediaWiki hosting for your community to build a free content wiki-based website
Blog is short for weblog. A weblog is a journal (or newsletter) that is frequently updated and intended for general public consumption. Blogs generally represent the personality of the author or the Web site.
ClinicalCases.org was
founded by physicians from the Cleveland Clinic, Cleveland, Ohio. It
uses blog technology to create "a free online case-based curriculum
of clinical medicine which was featured in the British Medical Journal
and Medscape.com and was referenced several times in the medical education
literature. The project is hyperlinked in the Web sites of 15 medical
schools in the
U.S., Canada and Europe."
The Medical Education Blog was set up by the University of Saskatchewan as a communication tool for College of Medicine Community-Based Faculty to comment on their Medical Education Broadcasts.
The Differential: Medscape Med Students is "a constantly evolving feature about life in medical school." You are invited to "Follow the lives of our featured medical students as they chronicle the ups and downs of medical training." The Differential is coordinated by the Medscape Med Students site editors, with entries by medical students currently in training.
Two free tools you can use to set up your own blog are:
- Blogger - From the folks at Google, an easy to use tool that allows you to drag and drop page elements to customize your blog’s design in a snap.
- WordPress.com - Another very user-friendly blogging tool
Apple.com describes a podcast as "audio or visual content that is automatically delivered over a network via free subscription. Once subscribed to, podcasts can be regularly distributed over the Internet or within your school’s network and accessed with an iPod, laptop, or desktop computer (both Macs and PCs)." They can also be accessed with other MP3 players. The most common file format used for Podcasting is MP3.
Apple.com continues, "A podcast’s content can
be anything conveyed by an audio or video file: a recorded lecture, a
foreign language lesson, a demonstration of biology principles. Instructors
can easily create a podcast of daily assignments and lectures from class and publish it for all of their students. Students can likewise create
and publish content and deliver it to their teachers or other students.
There
is a wide-range of educational content being developed for and delivered
by podcasting. These can be anything from curriculum-related
presentations to professional development communities, where educators
distribute content and best practices between members."
Starting Dec. 1, 2006, Harvard Medical School course
lectures became available for download onto the iPods of students, faculty and
staff.
The lectures
are translated into MP3 audio files, which community members can download
after subscribing to the class’s podcast feed. “This is the
first time any medical school, to my knowledge, has used an iPod as an
educational tool to distribute the entire curriculum,” said John
Halamka, HMS associate professor of medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess
Medical Center and chief information officer at HMS. Learn
more about the
podcasting program at Harvard.
Podcasting is also being used as a distribution tool for institutions and organizations hosting conferences. Rice University via the Fondren Library and Computer and Information Technology Institute (CITI) recently hosted the 2007 De Lange Conference which "aims to describe how knowledge will be accessed, discovered, and disseminated in the age of digital information." MP3 files of many of the speakers are available via Rice's Webcast page on their Web site.
If you would like to learn more about podcasting, please contact the Education Resource Center at erc@bcm.edu or phone 713-798-4746.
The paper from Boulos, Maramba and Wheeler mentioned earlier concludes that "If effectively deployed, wikis, blogs and podcasts could offer a way to enhance students', clinicians' and patients' learning experiences and deepen levels of learners' engagement and collaboration within digital learning environments. Therefore, research should be conducted to determine the best ways to integrate these tools into existing e-Learning programmes for students, health professionals and patients, taking into account the different, but also overlapping, needs of these three audience classes and the opportunities of virtual collaboration between them. Of particular importance is research into novel integrative applications, to serve as the 'glue' to bind the different forms of Web-based collaborationware synergistically in order to provide a coherent wholesome learning experience." Let the research begin!
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Upcoming Ed Tech Event
The University of Texas School of Health Information Sciences
will be hosting their 8th
Annual Regional Conference, Advances in Teaching and Learning. This
conference is designed to showcase research and innovations in teaching,
learning and technology. This interdisciplinary
meeting is a venue for faculty of higher education in the Health Sciences
to come together and share ideas and network in this rapidly changing
time in academia. There is still plenty of time to submit an abstract
for this conference if you are interested in participating as a presenter.
Whether presenting or attending, this is an excellent opportunity to
learn more about how technology is being used in education. The conference
will be held Thursday, May 17, 2007 from 8:00am to 5:00pm at 6901 Bertner
in the UT Houston School of Nursing and Student Community Center.