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In This Issue
- The Buzz:Automation Chimera: Education is Not Management
- Web 2.0 In Action:Facebook and Collegiality: A Serendipitous Social Niche
- Products and Apps Project Wonderland: Good Avatars Make Good Neighbors
- Online Resources:Webcast: Lecture Capture Improves Distance Learning Program at GWU
The Buzz
Automation Chimera: Education is Not Management
The lure of automating workflow online so human intervention is minimized is continually reinforced in the minds of higher education administrators by examples of automated campus systems such as financials, student information systems, and other enterprise systems. But what’s good for management is not always good for learning.
Web 2.0 In Action
Facebook and Collegiality: A Serendipitous Social Niche
Facebook is a way to greet a colleague as if she or he is on your own campus: a wave at a distance, a hello at the corner burrito place, a honk as you both leave the campus parking lot. Informal collegiality has been extended over the miles.
Products and Apps
Project Wonderland: Good Avatars Make Good Neighbors
Sun Microsystems’s Project Darkstar and the Wonderland Toolkit for building 3D spaces show why virtual reality is better for education than video conferencing. And Project Wonderland has announced its first education space.
Sun, Stanford Working To Archive History
In May in San Francisco, experts from leading universities, libraries, and research institutions around the world met as part of an ongoing effort to address a pressing issue: archiving the world’s history, right up to today.
Wimba Classroom 5.2 Expands Classroom Capture Support, Adds MP3 Downloads
At the NECC 2008 conference in Texas this week, Wimba launched a new version of Wimba Classroom, the virtual classroom component of the company’s Collaboration Suite. The new 5.2 release expands options for classroom capture and adds a variety of other functional and ease of use features.
Wake Forest U Aims To Reduce Note Taking with Classroom Capture
Students taking a course in venture capital at Wake Forest University have, over the last semester, benefited from the use of Recordant audio-capture technology that allows Web-based archiving, searching, and playback of course lectures. The university said one of the goals was to get students to close their notebooks and focus on comprehension, secure that they’d be able to access the captured lectures later on.
Online Resources
- Webcast: Lecture Capture Improves Distance Learning Program at GWU
In this free, 60-minute session, you will hear how Echo360 helped GWU create a simple, easy way to capture lectures and offer them to students online. Get details on the implementation process and hear the success the program has experienced, allowing it to extend its reach beyond the Washington, DC metropolitan area.
Sponsored by Echo360 - More resources
Web 2.0 is your single best up-to-the-minute resource for news, tactics, strategies, and case studies for teaching and learning in the new web world. You’ll find the latest information on social software (wikis, blogs, and chat), virtual learning environments, Multi-User Virtual Environments (MUVEs) such as Second Life, web-enabled collaboration tools, social collaboration sites, gaming, immersive education technologies, and more. Published bi-monthly, 1st and 3rd Wednesdays in HTML and text formats.
Our goal is to keep our readers well informed with thoughtful articles and the most up to date news. In addition, we hope our audience members will share with us their opinions regarding educational technology issues so we may be certain we are covering the topics that are of most interest to them. Please direct any questions or comments about Web 2.0 to Mary Grush, executive editor.

