Wetpaint released a new technology called "Injected" earlier this summer.  For those unfamiliar with Wetpaint, they're a free hosting service for wikis.  We use them for several class websites because they remove ads for educational sites and the version comparison is very good for collaborative writing.

After a long build-up, Google has finally released OpenSocial. Unfortunately, it seems that the name is a bit misleading. Many people, myself included, had assumed OpenSocial would provide a way of communicating between the various social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace.

These social networking sites have always been exceptions to the general rule of openness in web 2.0 sites. You cannot, for example, create an rss feed that shows all of your friends in Facebook, Bebo, and MySpace along with their recent updates. However, it would be quite easy to compile this same feed using accounts of your friends on LiveJournal and Blogger.

While focusing on financial aspects of implementing new technology  in higher education, this CNNMoney article contains some interesting statistics regarding the relevance of podcasting and "web 2.0" in higher education. In particular, it illustrates the increasing demand for access to "a next-generation learning environment" from incoming students (something I have personally predicted over the past several years).

 

Folded neatly into Google Docs, Google is at long last fielding its very own web-based presentation application, the other major contenders I am aware of being Zoho and ThinkFree. (I omit SlideShare because it does not provide editing functions.) The PowerPoint .ppt file I imported to Google looked very nice--allowing for the customary

There have been several recent attempts to use more advanced statistical analysis to judge the reliability of articles within Wikipedia.

The first is a color-coding scheme that gives the reader an idea of the reliability of parts of the article based on the number of times it has been revised. The basic idea is that if a certain section is constantly being revised, it's less reliable than a piece that has been virtually unchanged for a long period of time.

http://mashable.com/2007/08/08/wikipedia-color-coding/

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 University of Michigan has created a graduate program in social computing, solidifying the topic as a topic of interest to a critical mass of researchers. This article in the Wall Street Journal points to many indicators that social computing and social software is becoming popular. It's a recognition, I think, that social networking, blogging, and the Wikipedia are part of the permanent infrastructure of our lives.  

In a posting entitled "Social Scholarship on the Rise," academic librarian Laura Cohen outlines a series of scholarly practices that would take advantage of Web 2.0 technologies to make the processes of research and writing more public, more interactive, more collaborative, and more...well...social. Cohen's idealized portrait of the practice of social scholarship--from conceptualization to publication--is coherent and compelling.

OPML Workstation provides OPML creation, editing, hosting and distribution services, free of charge. OPML, for those not in the know, is a free-form, highly versatile markup language aimed at creating hierarchical outlines including multiple kinds of resources (nodes may include text, links, HTML, RSS feeds, rich media, or other XML). Here's my working example. 

NITLE 's Bryan Alexander provides an overview of Web 2.0, that ill-defined trend that has dinosaurs like me awake at night worrying that their focus on old-fashioned (Web 1.0) technology may soon make them (me!) extinct. He reviews the leading products and services that collectively define Web 2.0: wiki, blog, microcontent, RSS, folksonomies, social bookmarking, and aggregators. For each, he then speculates on how these new ways of creating, discovering, sharing, and analyzing information might change what happens in our classrooms. Collectively these technologies and their uses represent a major challenge to business-as-usual in academe. Web 2.0's core ethos and the texts it creates are radically distributed, non-hierarchical, non-authoritative. It is the culture of rip, burn, and mix, of peer-to-peer, of Just Do IT, and then let's see what happens. No more peer review. No more controlled vocabularies and professional cataloging. No more centralized authority (the library, the publisher, the news network) filtering what you see. The ideological challenge that Web 2.0 presents to academic culture is compounded by the technology challenges of integrating Web 2.0 services into campus systems.