Free Online Web 2.0 Courses

Az TEA, the Arizona Technology in Education Alliance has put a couple Web 2.0 courses online. They are free and self paced. One is Exploring Web 2.0, the other is Web 2.0: an online course for teachers. Both are targeted towards the K12 teacher, they are very useful to all instructors. They are delivered using Moodle, so for our instructors seeing and using another LMS interface would be a good exercise.

A New Look for Online Discussions?

I wonder If in the future our online discussions will look more like the conversation below. Maybe using video and audio, less textual in nature. Would it improve the conversation? Distract from it?

What will Google Wave look like and will it combine all of our interactive needs into one screen? How would the experience be different from our current Blackboard or other LMS experience? Some of these commonly used products like Seesmic offer us a glimpse of what parts of it may look like. Or not. Perhaps for Seesmic, the time has already past.

Below is Howard Rheingold and a few others thoughts about our online identities.

Is There Really Anything New?

Defining and deciding on just what the "new" skills/qualities of the teacher/learners are in this new computer age is and has been a topic of great discussion. Can you imagine, right now, just what they are. Not just the words, but whole sentences defining what is important for teachers to possess and students to be learning these days. Is it any different that it was ten years ago? Twenty years ago? Has the workplace changed in a way that we need to educate students in a different way? The role of the textbook, the role of the learner and teacher, have they changed? I found this discussion recently and it made me try to explain all of it to myself. Below is a presentation from Chris Lehmann on the "new" learner and the new teacher.

NECC 2009 - Progressive Pedagogy and 21st Century Tools

View more documents from Chris Lehmann.