Faculty Views on Social Networking and Web 2.0

Today, Thomson Publishing, an academic publishing company, released the results of a survey they conducted using more than 600 college professors. The findings showed that majority of professors don’t use social networking sites and Web 2.0 tools for instructional purposes, although they are familiar with some of these sites. More results are at the following website but unfortunately they didn’t publish complete results.

http://www.thomson.com/content/pr/tl/tl_high_ed/New_Media_Tools_Faculty_Survey

One thing I found interesting was number of faculty members who have their own blogs (10 percent) are not that different from general population (US) who have blogs (8 percent).

Web 2.0: A New Wave of Innovation for Teaching and Learning?

This is the title of an article by Bryan Alexander:

http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/erm0621.pdf

He does a good job in explaining the relationship between social software and web 2.0 but of course neither directly refers to the open source.

Here is another good read on the same topic:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/e-learning_20.php

Web 2.0 Blog

Over the weekend, I discovered an educational blog on Web 2.0.

http://web2booklet.blogspot.com

It was nice to see that this is a group blog with more than 10 contributors.

And following blog is dedicated to the videos that will help with the teaching and learning of web 2.0 tools:

http://web2videos.blogspot.com

Elgg on EduSpaces

Elgg is definitely one of best open social software designed for educators in mind.

http://eduspaces.net

Go2Web20.net

A list of web 2.0 tools:

http://www.go2web20.net

IHMC CMap Tools

As a visual learner like many others, one of the software programs I love to use for my work is Inspiration. “CMap Tools” is the grown-up version of Inspiration, concept mapping software. Its website is designed like a concept map:

http://cmap.ihmc.us

I have installed it on both PC and Mac computers, and the program worked fine on both platforms.

It is possible to share concept maps with the others via CMap servers, collaborate, search and browse other maps. Some of the papers on CMap can be found at the following URL:

http://cmap.ihmc.us/Publications

Here is CMap in action: