When I wasn't dreaming

Last night, when I wasn't dreaming, I was thinking. Now I'm a week into the eLearning course which I managed to get set up for a kickoff webinar that was delayed to February 20. You  can find the description of the course here, http://workshops2020.pbworks.com/w/page/138546024/Create_Your_Blended_Learning_Classroom, and here's the recording of the first webinar:

I had been given reassurance that the course would go ahead as planned when the RELO team in Bangkok informed me on February 8 that they were about to start promoting it. I was at CamTESOL in Phnom Penh at the time with a workshop to give the following day, and the day after that my beautiful assistant Bobbi and I flew to Thailand on a well-deserved break, having pre-paid for diving for three days. I downloaded Schoology manuals on my cell phone and took them on the boat with me, but didn't have much time or energy to focus on the eLearning course from the 8th until the day we spent transiting airports February 14, and I woke up in Penang on the 15th with only two days before the planned start of the course.

The first snag had been that I really didn't know much about Schoology, the platform I had selected on the basis of having experienced courses which others had developed, and been a collaborator on one that someone else had set up. Had I finally over-extended myself this time? I had come to the realization that there was a lot about Schoology that was not intuitive and that others had done for me in the past. So I had to set a full day aside to start googling my questions about Schoology and then systematically read the hits on the manuals that Schoology had thoughtfully placed on line to help users get started with the tool. Through this effort I was soon in position to get the course set up.

By then RELO Bangkok and I had decided to start with the first webinar on Feb 20, but the next problem was getting the course populated. There were not many respondents from Thailand to the announcements about the course from the week before and the original start date of Feb 17 came and went with only a 4 participants signed up besides another handful who were in other ways associated with managing the course. But RELO Bankok was amenable to my reaching out to my other networks, and once I had posted an invitation to my Facebook groups and on three TESOL Communities lists, we had 30 people registered before day of the first webinar on Feb 20.

Because the course had been planned as follow-up consultancies for participants whom it was assumed would have mostly been familar the my workshops at http://workshops2020.pbworks.com/, I had not built in any tutorial materials into the mix, and I had no idea who the new participants were, so I set up discussion forums asking who they were and why there were there. And on Feb 20, a few of them appeared at the opening webinar and I began to get an understanding of what direction the course should take. When we should meet was the first issue, but I was able to set up a kind of calendar once I discovered the participants responding were in South America (EST time zone), the Middle East, Thailand of course, and the rest of Asia (but not Japan, which would have been one time zone too far). From this we were able to fix a time for most of our events, 1400 UTC, waking hours morning and night for our complete range of participants.

So now we're working on the content for the course. I had loosely planned it on having participants learn by doing. Accordingly, there were three tasks, one for each week of the course.

Week 1 - create a digital poster or infographic

The first task for the week that ends three days from now is to create a "digital poster." This could be anything a participant wanted to project, as long as it had a link. I suggested it should have some mulitimedia element, or be an all-media presentation (a screen cast using Screencast-o-matic, for example). The the purpose of the assignment was to get participants to surface their existing digital literacies and to add to that tools I had referenced from my workshops, or that they might have learned about from others in the course. It's a community-as-curriculum approach, where participants drive what gets learned around their interests and what they need to know, and an active hands-on approach, where they learn by doing, making mistakes and correcting them, and from meaningful problem solving.

The problem with that approach is in getting participants to DO it with minimal guidance, though I have been tryng to steer them to my workshop materials, where the guidance is, expecially on the three tools I find most useful for creating blended learning environments and classrooms. Here are the links to those tools in my workshops:

• Jing for screen image (and even video) capture
  http://workshops2020.pbworks.com/w/page/137978502/Model_Teacher_Unit_2#Imagecapture
• Screencast-o-matic for capturing video screencasts along with mic and webcam
  http://workshops2020.pbworks.com/w/page/137978502/Model_Teacher_Unit_2#Screencasting/capture
• PBworks for cobbling together a quick portal which I find invaluable for drafting my ideas for blended learnng environments
  http://workshops2020.pbworks.com/w/page/137978502/Model_Teacher_Unit_2#Createafreeportalspace

I would like to add to Week 1's mix one more element, Yo! Teach.

Yo!Teach! is a backchannel chat tool that was developed to replace Today's Meet, which died at some point last year, despite having become quite popular for passing messages to and from classes and other gatherings. I learned about Yo!Teach via an article in the TESOL CALL-IS Newsletter:
http://newsmanager.commpartners.com/tesolcallis/issues/2019-08-26/3.html

Yo!Teach is also listed as one possible replacement for Today's Meet at this website
https://www.commonsense.org/education/articles/5-online-discussion-tools-to-fuel-student-engagement

When meeting blended learning classes online, it can be useful to set up a back channel. Then if anyone is having a problem, that person can post a message in Yo!Teach and stand a chance of there being someone at the other end who can help.  If there is no one there you can at least leave your message and someone should see it and reply, or if you leave a name or contact, get back to you at some point.

Yo! Teach was designed as a back channel to be used concurrently with live events. So I can monitor it during office hours, for the benefit of anyone who wanted to ask a question asynchronously (or synchronously) and know that they would be able to get it answered in live chat during office hours.

Week 2 - Create a digital story

The follow-on task for the second week is to advance from exploration and budding skills with the recommeded tools into something that can illustrate a narative, or digital story. This came up in the first week at the first office hour of the course, when Magali from Ecuador appeared and told us about a platform being developed at her university which featured a means for students to create digital stories using the primitive tools built into the platform. I suggested that she could use tools available online that she would have more control over, and link from the school's platform to the online artifacts that she and her students created in the wild using pre-existing Web 2.0 tools. That conversation was recorded, and you can see it here.

Digital storytelling is a concept that transcends multiple purposes. As with the simpler "digital poster", it would be an excercise that pushes participants to carry their skills forward from a simple infographic the first week to a narrative using digital tools which they would bring to bear on the project according to their abilities. And the benefit of that would be that everyone would see what everyone else's abilities were and scaffold one another when those abilities were a rung or two up the scaffold. Everyone would learn from one another.

So now that I'm getting some interaction from participants in the course, three days into its emergence, I have clearer ideas about how to proceed. Now I'm ready to move forward with materials for the second week that would focus us on tools that, through the ruse of finding and using them to create a digital story, would get people thinking about and working with the tools that would be most useful in creating and using blended (and flipped) learning classrooms.

Week 3 - Create some aspect of a blended learning classroom

The third week asks participants to start some aspect of a blended learning classroom. Again there is no instruction apart from what the instructor / English Language Specialist is modeling. When put in the position of having to appear in Thailand with a platform that would encompass my workshops, I fell back on PBworks. I tried both Wix and Weebly but found those frustrating. PBworks allows me most flexible control over my portals. I can embed images and other graphics and even videos. It's HTML-based and I can get at the code. It's quick to work with so I can alter it one day to the next. I have a system of setting up archives and using the sidebar for easy navigation around the site. The sidebar and table of contents widgit create bookmarks throughout the site which can each be linked to, so pointing participants to exactly where you want them to look is quick and easy. I haven't found anything better than or that even comes close to PBworks for power, simplicity of implemetation, and speed and alterability, except perhaps Google Docs, which could do almost the same thing but without the sidebar.

For the eLearning I added the Schoology layer because PBworks lacks a way for users to interact with one another. Schoology can host forums and announce events. It's also quick and easy to work with, moreso than Moodle. Although the complexity of Moodle makes it more robust, Moodle has to be hosted through someone who maintains the server, and this creates problem both in the permissions you have to control your own course and the stability of that server. If you want to host with someone whose business it is to host other people's Moodles, that usually comes with a fee. Schoology at the moment offers reliable hosting with no fee for the basic functions. So it's a good starter platform for creating an LMS.

The foregoing two paragraphs in this post are my content for Week 3, but I'm not explicit in teaching that in my coursel My intent is to model to participants how to create blending learning classrooms by getting them into one and letting them see how it looks and feels, and do the same in their own contexts if the wish, or apply the look and feel to other tools if they have access to others. So that gets us through week 3 and to the end of the course.

After the course, once I've stopped dreaming

But life goes on, and this is what I was thinking about last night as I lay awake at dawn, the realities I'm recording here encroaching on my dreams. In April I am scheduled to give a presentation at the TESOL conference in Denver as a member of a panel on "Creating Materials in a Digital World," which has been included in the TESOL 2020 convention program in Denver, April 1st, 2020, 1:00 PM - 2:45 PM in room 402 at The Colorado Convention Center.

This came about when the Materials Writers Interest Section, in conjunction with Career Paths Professional Learning Network, issued a call last August for panelists "who have experience adapting, creating, and using digital materials to teach English and train English teachers. ... Such experience may include, but is not limited to, blended and hybrid learning, online learning, gamification, differentiated learning, building online learning communities and teacher education." The abstract for the panel is:

As the world becomes more dependent on technology ELT professionals find ways to adapt. This presentation shows participants in all stages of their career paths various ways they can adapt, create, and develop materials for digital learning in a variety of contexts for language teaching and teacher training.

Although I had neither conceived nor imagined this English Language Specialist project when I applied to be on the panel, it is definitely what I'll be focusing on.

This brings me to one last part of the jigsaw puzzle. Every three months I have to produce an article, preferably an edited one, for the On the Internet column of TESL-EJ, http://tesl-ej.org/.  I wrote the last one and it is perhaps bad form for an editor to write two in a row for his own column, but I may have little choice, as my calls for papers go unanswered. A write-up of my TESOL presentation might make a worthy article for the next issue of OTI if no one else comes forward.

In this post, I may have got started on that article :-)

Post-WiAOC 2007: CONNECTing Conversations on Networking, Education - aftermath

Webheads http://webheads.info has just finished its second almost-annual, universally global, completely free, online conference. http://wiaoc.org. I say 'just' but the conference, which we also term a 'convergence' ended ten days ago. And I'm just now finding time to blog it.

It's not that I'm lazy or spaced out, but the convergence took all spare time from me for many weeks leading up to it, and when it ended I had desperately to attend to odds and ends I'd been holding at bay, like spending time with a neglected family and creating exams and giving and marking them plus a backlog of student assignments, and finalizing grade reports (which I just now finished; hence my return to posting here).

And finally I'm looking forward to having time for some reflection. I'm at the stage where suddenly a halcion summer has appeared as a gently spreading plateau at the end of a long uphill struggle, and I'm staring ahead at three months of being able to spend time on my own projects for a change.

I have some interesting projects in the works. I just emerged from a planning meeting at my workplace and discovered that it is being assumed that my role in upcoming development in courses I teach will be to implement a web 2.0 multiliteracies, blogging, social networking component in a syllabus that focuses heavily on transiting from Office 2003 to 2007 (should I introduce Open Office? that would be a thrust too far I'm afraid). I had blogged my plans for this curriculum component much earlier here: http://advanceducation.blogspot.com/2007/02/multiliteracies-and-curriculum.html but it has only now been confirmed to me that this is what I'll be working on next term.

I'm elated at that because it fits in with courses I'm giving in Spain this summer, and perhaps in Sudan in August (see http://www.vancestevens.com/papers), and I've been doing courses and workshops lately in web 2.0 and in particular an interesting project on writingmatrix which I just posted on in a self access learning list.

The question on the self-access list was how to keep students learning English over the summer, in particular how to encourage them to engage in "conversation/interaction of meaning/substance"

I suggested for "written conversation/interaction of meaning/substance -- Keep blogs?

"The teacher could promise to comment on them from time to time during the summer. The teacher could manage this task by using bloglines, http://www.bloglines.com.

"To learn how to start blogs students and teachers can use this tutorial:
http://www.homestead.com/prosites-vstevens/files/efi/blogger_tutorial.htm

"But students could seek out students from other countries and have some fun making new friends this summer by joining in the writingmatrix project. To do this your students simply tag their summer fun postings writingmatrix. Then they can use http://www.technorati.com/ (search on tags) to find other blog posts with the writingmatrix tag. When they find another blog they like of someone else in the writingmatrix project they simply leave a comment and perhaps invite that person to view their blog."

I further noted that "at http://wiaoc.org/ project members organized a presentation entitled Writingmatrix: CONNECTing students with blogs, tags, and social networking, http://writingmatrix.wikispaces.com/. The other teachers are Nelba Quintana and Rita Zeinstejer (from Argentina), Doris Molero (from Venezuela), and Sasha Sirk (Slovenia).

I put my slides explaining the project online here http://www.slideshare.net/vances/vance-writingmatrix-wiaoc2007/ and the other contributions are posted at http://webheadsinaction.org/node/174 .
A recording of the presentation at WiAOC can be found here:
http://streamarchives.net/node/48

"This is an attempt to utilize the social networking aspect of blogs (via the simple means of tagging posts in such a way that identifies each posting as being that of another student in the project) to enable students to make friends through blogging. If it works for you or your students I'd appreciate having your feedback."

Then to check on the project I went to Technorati and did a search on writingmatrix: http://www.technorati.com/posts/tag/writingmatrix

I was looking to see what students had posted but I came upon a blog post that mentioned writingmatrix but was tagged wiaoc 2007: http://maryhillis.blogspot.com/2007/05/wiaoc-2007.html. Mary Hillis had visited the convergence but found she really liked our presentation, the one mentioned above, and another one on blogging by Carla Arena, Erika Cruvinel, and Ronaldo Lima. It is gratifying to see that aggregation based on tagging is working and is indeed putting like-minded students and teachers in touch with one another.

I left a comment of course.

And if Mary stops by here, "Hi Mary!"

---

Someone responded to my list posting, asking "How do you tag?"
Here is my response:

What are known as TAGS in social networking might be called something else in various blogs and wikis. For example, in Blogger they are called LABELS in English and Etiquetas in Spanish Blogspot blogs, and probably something else in German. There’s a good article on Tagging at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tags. This explains the concept but doesn’t tell you how to do it.

I’ve also seen tags called ‘categories’

Technorati focuses on blogs and analyses what’s out there according to their tags (among other features).

We have a project where we try to get kids late teens to tag (or ‘label) their blog posts writingmatrix . To find the post I visit
http://www.technorati.com/posts/tag/writingmatrix

and there, just grabbing one at random, http://leonardobravo726.blogspot.com/2007/05/welcome-to-my-blog.html, I find it’s one of Doris’s students from Maracaibo. Doris works at URBE. This students tagged his blog posting efl, introduction, urbe, and writingmatrix. I found it by requesting tags for writingmatrix. If you searched all blog posts tagged efl you’d probably turn up thousands, but if you were looking for URBE for example, you’d find fewer, and some of these would be tagged writingmatrix as well.

I just tried http://www.technorati.com/posts/tag/writingmatrix+AND+urbe and got 4 hits but I’m sure there are more. We still haven’t learned how all this really works. We need teachers in this mix to help us figure it out.

Still playing around, I tried http://www.technorati.com/posts/tag/writingmatrix+urbe and got 29 hits, so I think this is the correct syntax.

I've tagged this post in a number of ways. You can find my tags below where it says 'labels for this post.' You might be able to find my post (this one) with a technorati search on writingmatrix but I also used wiaoc2007 and vance among many other tags.

I just tried http://www.technorati.com/posts/tag/writingmatrix+AND+vance and got 5 hits, but none of them what I was looking for (this post, at least not yet ;-) (and same results for http://www.technorati.com/posts/tag/writingmatrix+vance). There were surprises.

One of the teachers in the project is starting a tag project on serendipity, and serendipity is exactly where this leads. And if you think this is fun, wait till we get on to del.icio.us. That’s where the kids will really get carried away (find out who’s reading their posts, who’s tagging them, what they’re tagging them ;-)

I just tried http://www.technorati.com/posts/tag/serendipity

And got 32,000 hits, starting at 15 min ago. This is a case where I would recommend Rita try TWO tags serendipity+writingmatrix to narrow down the field. Right now there are no hits in that combination, which means it would probably work VERY well if she has her kids do it the multiple-tag way.

You can also tag flickr photos, google maps (I think, or if not there must be 3rd party software that allows it), and at least half the stuff if not 99% of what you can put up on the read-write web 2.0. So students can take pics during their hols and post them online and tag them writingmatrix or whatever and their friends can find them.

You’ll find you have that opportunity (to tag) on almost any web 2.0 site. It might take some looking for but it’s worth doing.

Multiliteracies and Curriculum

The computer-culture in the UAE, where I teach Arab-national first- and second-year college students, tends to be high relative to other countries in the region. Still, with developments in the field racing ahead in the year 2007, teachers as well as students are challenged to keep up with concepts driving the emerging literacies. There is an opportunity in the courses I teach now to revise the literacy aspects of our curriculum to help learners understand some of the ramifications of evolving uses of the latest technologies.

Basic premises

In the materials I'm involved with, the focus is to raise learner awareness of changes to the social structure of software. I don’t intend to call it exactly that at this introductory level, but perhaps a good starting point, one directed at a wider sophisticated audience, is Time's declaration of YOU as its person of the year.

In recognizing all of us as people of the year, Time has acknowledged that there has been a dramatic shift in alignment of control over the power structures traditionally used to convey and arbitrate media. One aspect of this shift is that software (and publishing and other social orders impacted by that software) have moved from the enterprise model into a more user-centric one where normal people and smaller, even individual, entities and groupings have increasing power over software and the Internet, and over content provided in both domains. This shift has important ramifications for the way people can now work both individually and collaboratively with software running either on their PC's and/or over the Internet.

ENTERPRISE AND OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE

I look at software as falling into these main categories: Enterprise, Open Source, Web 2.0

Enterprise software can be characterised by companies like Microsoft, which create software for sale and profit and guard its code, revealing only what is necessary to allow others to design products that will work with it, in such a way that the company retains control over the process and retains its dominance over aspiring competitors. One result, apart from satisfaction of the shareholders in the company, is software that sometimes gets 'published' without adequate testing, so that users are vulnerable, and the company, as in the case of Microsoft, is constantly having to supply patches, since the real testing of the software occurs only after it has been purchased and shipped.

Many software developers have responded with their support of an alternative Open Source model of software development. In contrast to the enterprise model, the software is developed by interested parties seeking not profit, but mainly to enhance their standing within a community of developers by being associated with the creation of the best possible software for a given task. The code is not guarded at all. It's made publically available in the hope that others in the community will create improvements to it. The result is generally software that gets thoroughly tested during the development process, so there are rarely unanticipated surprises for end-users (and if there are, the community learns about it quickly and moves together to correct the problem). Open source software is not created for profit, but business models are emerging whereby money can be made developing refinements and specific implementations of open source resources for companies whose profits rely on using that software effectively.

Open source software is by definition freely downloadable, but where it has to be set up on a server, this might be inconvenient for some users. Again the community has tended to share resources, so that server-based services are sometimes made available to all users. The concept has broadened into what has come to be known as Web 2.0, or the read-write Web. Lawrence Lessig has gone so far as to characterize the 20th century as the read-only century and the present one as the read-write century. Lessig's point is that whereas the enterprise model dominated media distribution until only recently, we are rapidly entering an era where this is no longer the case. It is important that this development be better understood by its beneficiaries (all of us) as the impacts are far-reaching in the way we organize ourselves productively through our understanding of what it means to be 'literate'.

I don't intend to include all that follows in the course, but as background and illustration of how these models apply in the real world, we can draw from the following cases:

Thomas Freedman in his influential book The World is Flat discusses how IBM gave up developing its own enterprise rival to Apache server and instead contributed its best engineers to the Apache community in order to be able to resume a business model on which the deliverables would be enhancements to the Apache kernel. That’s just one example of the power of community to produce a superior product (for free) compared to a commercial, patented, closed-source one.

Another good example is characterized in the Blackboard vs. Moodle approaches to development of learning management systems (background information regarding this controversy abounds on the Internet; here is a link to a Feb 2007 article in the well-respected T.H.E. Journal).

My own perception is that Blackboard is becoming regarded in the Open Source community as an old-school Goliath who’s made waves and rocked boats by taking out patents on certain aspects of LMS’s that other developers consider open source and unpatentable. On the day its patents were granted Blackboard brought suit against one of its competitors, Desire to Learn, for royalties owed under the new patents. This has sent shivers down the rest of the open source CMS community in case Blackboard were to use its fait accompli at the patent office to go after users of Moodle and others, including end users, for not paying royalties to the patent holder. But now we see this being reversed one slingshot at a time. Blackboard is seen to be undermining its own potential customer base at the cost of its reputation in the educational community, and more recently there are moves afoot to have the patent decisions reversed.

While this is going on, Sakai, another white horse open source project, is reaching fruition. If you agree that Moodle, arguably the strongest open source rival to Blackboard to date, scales well to enterprise settings despite its lesser polish, then seemingly the only real argument for paying licensing fees to Blackboard is that it might be worth the costs (to some customers) for an LMS solution that appears more crisply enterprise in a Web browser. Sakai apparently looks the part, slick and groomed for enterprise, yet has been developed for free distribution as an open source project by educational entities each taking responsibility for developing different parts of it. It seems that this could be a rather large nail destined for the coffin of closed-source enterprise ventures.

I find this of great interest in my own work context, but I see these two examples appearing, if at all, as text boxes in the materials I envisage , whose purpose would be to make the point that open source is on its way to significantly augmenting if not replacing the enterprise model of software development.

So to continue with a course outline, I am thinking ...

1. Enterprise and Open Source software
2. An overview of Web 2.0 tools
3. Social Networking
4. Implications for classroom (i.e. project) management

---------------------------------------

Example software products following the first three models of development and implemention are:

MS Office –-> Open Office –-> http://docs.google.com/

---------------------------------------

AN OVERVIEW OF WEB 2.0 TOOLS

There are many hooks for a wider understanding and use of Web 2.0 tools in modern curriculum settings. Collaborative Google spreadsheets might be used in portfolio/project work for example. I’m not sure if you can format in Google docs to the extent you can in MS Word, but the potential is certainly worth exploring.

The two most salient Web 2.0 tools with application for our students are blogs and their close cousins podcasts and wikis, though there are many more -- online collaborative calendars, for example. I hope to list a few more here eventually; meanwhile:

• Many listings of Web 2.0 tools are linked from my Moodle course on Multiliteracies for Collaborative Learning Environments (guest access welcome).
• A well illustrated example of how the younger generation sees these tools as being used in various modalities ranging from social collaboration to enterprise project management can be found here: http://www.wsjb.com/RPC/V1/Home.html
• I have just come across a good listing of "Digital Literacies & Emerging Educational Technologies" at this wiki: http://couros.wikispaces.com/emerging+technologies

SOCIAL NETWORKING

Aggregation

The concept with greatest implication for collaborative and project work in education (and beyond, in the real world of collaboration and project management in the workplace) is that blogs and wikis can be aggregated.

I have an explanation of how this is accomplished at http://www.vancestevens.com/rss_edu.htm. This document explains how blogs for a class can be aggregated via an aggregator (e.g. Bloglines) in such a way that they can be efficiently read/followed by the teacher and others in the class, or by manager and co-workers in an enterprise project venture.

Tags

Blogs can be tagged, and tags also can be aggregated. One device for doing that is http://del.icio.us/ . Jon Pederson has developed a good explanation of how del.icio.us can be used to good effect by educators: http://docs.google.com/View?docid=ad62vwjv8zm_6fh3r2s

The concepts of tagging and aggregation lie at the heart of social networking. For example, my son posts family photos at his Facebook acct and tags the ones of me DAD. I then get an email that tagged photos are available. I get the URLs of only my photos but the whole albums are available as long as the owner has indicated that s/he trusts me with them. I don’t think we need to introduce our students to Facebook here in the Middle East, but participation in social networking sites like Facebook illustrate how the concepts work in a social context.

Podcasting

Podcasting is one highly productive example of how these concepts can be focused on two important literacy goals:

1. achieving appropriate levels of digital competence in a changing world
2. and staying abreast through lifelong learning.

In order to access podcasts, one needs to have a working knowledge of using an aggregator such as iTunes or Juice (a level of knowledge akin to knowing how to drive as opposed to knowing how to build or repair a car).

The working knowledge needed is two-fold:

1. ability to subscribe to podcasts
2. and to occasionally refresh subscriptions.

Internet search skills are needed to locate desired podcasts in the first place, and some multimedia and file management skills will help in downloading, storing, retrieving, and playing the files retrieved. A computer is all that is essentially needed for this, though most people like to transfer their files to an mp3 player and listen to them while away from their computer.

Although the only skill levels needed harvest podcasts are at the level of those needed while driving, higher education is pursued in order to achieve greater understanding, in the case of driving, of the mechanics and physical forces involved in converting energy to produce the torque to propel the car, etc. Similary, among the goals of a computer literacy course should be some understanding how RSS and aggregation works, and in theory how one can create one's own blogs and podcasts, and disseminate these to a wider audience through social networking skills.

Again, I have a Web document covering aspects of these issues: http://www.vancestevens.com/casting.htm

Conclusion

Enterprise is the ‘beyond’ application of these principles. But I think that blogs and wikis could be very well worked into current curriculum in student collaborative projects and in all aspects involving reporting findings from Internet search. These techniques and concepts could become built into those modules, and enable the class to pull together while learning about team techniques based in social networking concepts.

In not only social and enterprise but also in educational project/class management contexts, I think that these concepts are important because they show the way teams are learning to work together using the latest shareable Web-based technologies once they have achieved the requisite level of computer literacy.