Conference for Distance Teaching & Learning, Web 2.0 Presentations

I am at attending the '09 Conference for Distance Teaching and Learning in Madison WI and I had the privilege this morning to attend two presentations on the subject Web 2.0. The first was "It's magic: Using Web 2.0 tools to create learning communities," which was presented two designers from the University of Iowa. In the course of their presentation they very enthusiastically offered a brief introduction on how social networking tools have caused a shift in the pedagogical approach to creating collaborative environments. Their emphasis was on students' ability to build personal learning environments and personal learning networks to create rich internet experiences (RIEs), and they encouraged instructors to transition from their pushing content to allowing learners to pull content. They also talked about the future of how a web 3.0 and 4.0 will arise as a result of a correlation of information connections and social connections, and referenced this blog page from ZDNet. They offered the following collection of resources from the UW-Madison Distance Teaching & Learning Conference Session.

The second presentation which followed immediately after the first, was titled "Creating online learning communities using Web 2.0 technology," presented by an IT consultant from Bethel University. In this session the presenter did a fine job of defining community as having five components and then described how each component is applied to the online learning community. The presenter made the following striking points: the first was that others can't be forced to become engaged in a community; the second was a comparison/contrast between digital natives (those who are using iphones and are involved in social networking) and digital immigrants (those who are just learning to speak a new language and who try to impose their ideas and sensibilities on digital natives).

What may have been more telling were the audience's questions at the conclusion of this second presentation, such as:

-What tools would you use?
-How do you use flash?
-Is Adobe Connect a free product?

One good question that sparked some audience participation was how to work with a group of students with various skill levels. Another audience member suggested that each student rate their own skill level, then pair up a lower skilled learner with a higher skilled learner as "buddies."

Here's a link to the informative powerpoint presentation that was used for the second presentation. And here's the link to the presenter's wiki page or cyber-office.

Yesterday I attended a half-day workshop on how a course design group would go about building a simulated game. The workshop was very informative, but so far I found this morning's second presentation on Web 2.0 to be the best one I've attended.