Whats going on with web2.0

An old colleague emailed me, in response to a friend request on Twitter, asking what was going on with web2.0 and education - my quick response was -

Twitter is interesting but you need a community and I voyeuristically
watch a group of tech people I vaguely know rather than being part of a
community - sad but you can't just create one!



Some people are using Twitter for education - short quizzes and polls -
haven't seen it in action myself but some good reports - you have to
get students to use hash signs to get it to work well for indexing.



Micro-blogging - either using Twitter or a dedicated service lit Coveritlive.com is
being used a lot in some conferences etc and could be used for
simultaneous discussion in lectures. Audience response systems are
being looked at by a number of places to make lectures interactive -
you can either get a dedicated system or people can use their mobile
phones with a system like http://www.polleverywhere.com/ - immediate quizzes and you
can display the results immediately.



Web 2.0 stuff generally - there seems to be lot going on around
podcasts and people using them like you did/do your blog - there are a
couple of automatic tools which will turn your blog into a podcast if
you don't fancy doing both. For collaborative student projects people
are using Google documents or google sites or the Zoho tools.
Wesminster University are going into Google applications on an
institutional level which is interesting.