Fred Oliveira, founder of the Web 2.0 Workgroup, recently wrote a nice piece on ethnography and designing for the web. He has followed up that article with a posting yesterday regarding how several high profile companies implement these ideas in their own organisations.

These principles can be applied to the design of web based apps or implementations for teaching & learning. Teachers and students can collaborate on the design. Observe how the students achieve their goals and figure out how they make a difference. What is the nature of the transformative process. Take note of what the students are actually doing. How do they make that journey from point ‘a’ to point ‘b’ in terms of the transformative process. It is not always easy to distill that process and impossible to bottle yet if the essential ingredients can be identified perhaps a web based translation of these moments could be chartered and developed to act as a scaffold for those students who experience difficulties in successfully completing that journey from point ‘a’ to point ‘b’.

Thoughtful article from Information Architects Japan about inefficient aspects of Web 2.0. I tend to agree with the author. One can Twitter, Blog and Jaiku their contacts to distraction. I personally think Jaiku is neat as it broadcasts updates made to my blogs and Flickr pages. I have the Jaiku badge on my home page and acts like a “What’s new” column for visitors to my web site. Twitter is neat however I tend to think that Jaiku may render Twitter redundant. Jaiku, however, can be slow to update. Twitter is immediate. Explore each of the aforementioned platforms here.

Blogger
Flickr
Twitter
Jaiku

This map came up in Stumbler. A visual overview of the Internet 2007. It was created by Information Architects Japan. Google, Yahoo, Wikipedia, eBay and all of the usual supsects dominate. Interesting to see Baidu from China up there as well. Facebook and Technorati are key hubs.

A nice page about Web 2.0 technologies in education from Solution Watch. This is a well written article with worthwhile links and advice for educators from all fields.

Staff at the Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County in the US have established a blog and a list of activities focused upon the application of Web 2.0 technologies such as blogs and wikis in education. They have compiled a list of 23 activities that one can complete, in any sequence and at any pace, in order to gain an insight into Web 2.0 technologies and their relationship to education. Well worth a closer look, particularly by teachers who are keen to learn more about Web 2.0.