It's rare as an educational technologist that you find a cutting edge technology whose use is immediately obvious to faculty.  Google Sky is the exception. Astronomers will need little convincing after seeing the latest version of Google Earth in action.

 http://earth.google.com/sky/skyedu.html
 

Most literary scholars know about the fabulous online editions of Blake, Rossetti, and Whitman, but in my experience many people who use these editions regularly don't yet know about Collex, "an open-source collections- and exhibits-builder designed to aid humanities scholars working in digital collections or within federated research environments like NINES." NINES is an acronym for Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-century Electronic Scholarship; it links together many important 19thC digital editions.

Rome Reborn 1.0 resides at the crossroads of history, archeology, technology and imagination. You can visit the project's website or read a short report on its unveiling from CNET News.com where you will learn that the simulation "shows almost the entire city within the 13-mile-long Aurelian Walls in 320 A.D., when Rome was the multicultural capital of the Western world." One of the more provocative tidbits from the project site is the fact that the creators are hoping to incorporate the work of other scholars who would "contribute their work as bricks in the larger edifice." If that dream of collaboration is realized, the virtual city would double as a spatialization of particular scholarly projects and as a metaphor for the scholarly endeavor at large. At the same time, as you view the video clips on the project site, you may be reminded of Second Life and find yourself wishing to move about in Rome Reborn as a toga-clad avatar. The pedagogical (and other) possibilities are staggering.

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.