As a companion piece to a hands-on campus technology expo, a group of us at Wesleyan recently put together a round-up of various Web 2.0 technologies including overviews, practical academic applications, references to live examples, and a few tips on how to get started. You will find our "Web 2.Xpo" blog at http://web20.blogs.wesleyan.edu/. Even if you are already acquainted with most of the content, and even if some of it is tailored to the Wesleyan environment, it might prove useful as a place to direct the uninitiated. And you can leave comments.

The list of tools to help you avoid doing meaningful work just got  longer. Twitter (http://www.twitter.com), a platform that blurs the lines between blogs and instant messaging, provides an outlet for anyone who wants to tell anyone else who might care what they are doing at that very moment. In his essay "What are you doing? The allure of Twitter, the latest web senstion" Slate's Michael Agger does a nice job of describing what this new world is like, and wonders out loud about how all of this might help us live more purposefully. Agger doesn't ask how this might be useful in an educational setting. Twitter strikes me as interesting, not as a tool I would use, but rather--for the anthropologists and sociologists--a phenomenon to understand. Why would we want to share our thoughts and ideas with complete strangers on an hourly basis?

Daniel Sullivan, the president of St. Lawrence University, recently published an essay in the Educause Review entitled "Why IT Matters to Liberal Education" . In the face of the latest backlash against bulging IT budgets reinforced by books such as Nicholas Carr's "Does IT Matter?" , Sullivan's essay is useful because it articulates not only why IT does matter for higher education in general, but specifically looks at the connections that exist between the goals of liberal education and the instrumental value of various technology, services, and facilities that can help achieve those goals. My favorite quote from the essay has to be
"The role of technology in liberal learning is decidedly as complex as the university's mission" which at one level seems like a dodge, but at another level explains why the activity of explaining why IT matters requires more time and attention than many have to attend to. He goes on to document the particular challenge of doing IT on a small campus (lack of economies of scale), but suggests that even in the face of that challenge, it is a critical mistake to not understand the strong connections between IT and the evolving 21st. century liberal education.

Valleywag has a very nice map of social networking sites and their popularity by country.

I notice they don't have Mixi in Japan, which is odd, but they have the international examples I already knew about, along with a few others. If you're looking to extend your classroom and bring students in contact with people from a certain country, this is a great place to start.