Web 2.0 Workshop with Tom Daccord -- Day 1

As people arrived for Day 1, our first task was to find a place to sit in the computer lab. As we got ourselves situated, our presenter, Tom Daccord, came around to introduce himself and handed each of us a complimentary (and signed) copy of his new book, Best Ideas for Teaching with Technology – A Practical Guide for Teachers by Teachers (co-written with Justin Reich; just published this month by M.E. Sharpe).
The formal session began soon thereafter with introductions all around. Participants were mostly teachers and came from places near (Dedham, MA) and far (Toronto, North Carolina, Seattle, and India [!]).
Tom began our three-day workshop on Web 2.0 with a PowerPoint presentation setting forth reasons why the so-called “Web 2.0” tools are so important in our curricula and classrooms. According to Tom, Web 2.0 sites and tools are:
• interactive and intuitive
• facilitate collaboration
• free or low cost
• accessible from anywhere
• varied privacy options
• files hosted on Web
• can embed multimedia

Whereas the first stage of the web’s existence (Web 1.0) was a break-through in so many ways, particularly in its potential to connect people through a vast online network, the content that we accessed was almost always created by someone else. The content could be of great interest and be quite useful, but it was typically “read only.” That is to say, the content we found online was written by someone else (the “expert”). Again, it was a tremendous increase in accessing information for research and study but users did not interact with the “expert” or have a way to add their own perspectives let alone corrections/updates. We users received information but adding our own content was not that easy.
The hallmark of Web 2.0 is that the web has become a two-way street. We users can still access an incredible treasure trove of information but, with Web 2.0, we can also add, correct, and share our own contributions to the wealth of information and knowledge online. With blogs, wikis, and social networking sites easily available, sharing one’s own ideas is easy. Plugging into other people’s thinking and research is also far easier. There has been an explosion of multi-media (video, audio, graphics) readily accessible from any connected computer. The power made possible by collaboration and other forms of social networking across the web – in terms of enhancing teaching and learning – would be difficult to overstate.
As noted above, the low- or no-cost nature of most Web 2.0 tools, the easy-to-use interface of most of these sites and programs, plus the fact that the information is housed online (we don’t have to carry the content around on our computers and we can access it from anywhere) are additional major factors in empowering pretty much everybody in being a presence online, if they so choose. Of course, not every tool is appropriate or useful in our teaching, but there are many Web 2.0 tools that offer much to us as educators.
Some authors/thinkers that Tom recommended today include:
• Ben Schneiderman -- Leonardo's Laptop: Human Needs and the New Computing Technologies
• Daniel H. Pink -- A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future
• Will Richardson -- Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms
• Andy Carvin -- PBS Learning Now blog and website: http://www.pbs.org/teachers/learning.now/
• Kathy Schrock -- her educator’s guide website is now part of the Discovery Education web presence: http://school.discoveryeducation.com/schrockguide/
Tom recommended the Classroom 2.0 website as a prime example of the teaching and learning potential of Web 2.0: http://www.classroom20.com/
Our focus on this, Day 1, was blogs, wikis, and web pages. We began by creating a wiki using Wikispaces, creating and linking new pages, editing, tracking history, etc. Tom had already created a Wikispaces site devoted to this workshop (view here) which he had us use for some of the practice using the discussion tool of a wiki. On our own sites, he showed us how to include multi-media such as audio or video. The power of a wiki is that it offers all users the opportunity to add to the content, including making corrections and updates. So, unlike Web 1.0’s reliance on individual experts to assemble and error-check content (one might say the “Encyclopedia Britannica approach”), wikis offer the collective expertise of all the users coming to the site. Of course, this type of tool also raises the question of learning to double-check sources; just because a website says it’s so doesn’t necessarily make it so, especially in the case of a wiki. However, comparisons of factual mistakes in a non-collaborative source such as online encyclopedias and a collaborative one such as Wikipedia have found little significant difference in the authority and veracity of one over the other (news story here).
Our time doing wiki site creation also included discussion about sources of video with the inevitable misgivings about YouTube and the advocacy of TeacherTube and SchoolTube (the latter a site where students can post work and one I had not heard of before -- content is approved before it is posted).
After a very brief look at Tumblr, which is a sort of short-form blog creation tool, Tom had us use Blogger to create our own blog. Tom went through the steps for setting up a blog, posting to it, setting up the profile and the various formatting settings available. Tom also introduced RSS/Atom feeds. We talked about the kinds of assignments for which a blog might be useful, particularly with the comment feature.
Time flew by pretty fast and it was time for Day 1 to end. We had a good time.


Evening postscript: I'm calling this a good omen! Went to the restaurant adjacent to the hotel this evening. It's an Asian restaurant called Bamboo. Dinner was pretty good but the big payoff after this first day of workshop was the fortune I got in my fortune cookie: "The skills you have gathered will one day come in handy." I do think this first day was great, so it's great to know that it's all going to be worth it!