Using Web 2.0 Infrastructure to Improve

Classroom Communication Manuel A. Pérez-Quiñones

perez@cs.vt.edu • http://perez.cs.vt.edu

Department of Computer ScienceCenter for Human-Computer Interaction

Virginia Tech

Dropbox• Store and share documents

online

• Software syncs your online and computer files

• Share folders transparently

• To write papers with my students, we just share a Dropbox folder

• Suggested (but not done) to just have a folder for class, drop materials there, gets copied to students automatically

• Free software, limit of 2GB; paid option for more storage

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Twitter.com• Micro blogging platform

• Status (what are you doing) service

• Inform your friends, be informed about their status

• “Follow” friends, famous people, or single words

• Updates can be received via email, SMS (to your phone), desktop client, etc.

• Has been used in courses to support “contextualized” teaching (teaching in the moment)

• I use it to post announcements and updates to course materials, and to interact with students in short bursts

• Follow me: mapq

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“The class twitter account served as a nice platform for the class participants to built rapport and exchange thoughts and ideas. On a personal note, […] whenever I wanted a clarification, I just sent him a private message on Twitter and got back a quick reply.”

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“CS5774 made me re-evaluate my view of the importance of Web 2.0 technologies. The "Web 2.0" label had been attached to so many concepts that it had lost much of its meaning for me. This class helped me see the underlying social nature of these concepts and how they can be deployed in meaningful ways to enhance systems which might not normally be considered "social" software systems.”

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“I found the incorporation of easy to use software like Moodle, Twitter, email list serve and video podcasts invaluable in providing appropriate context and information to me outside of the class. Thanks to the use of these technologies, I could come prepared to class about the topic that was going to be taught and since I wasn't distracted by having to write notes in class, I could devote all my attention to the conversations transpiring in class. […] Being a full time professional with several responsibilities outside of class, I found having this "context" available literally at my fingertips at all times very useful.”

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Other systems

• Identify friends (facebook, orkut, friendster)

• Education (citeulike, campusbug, carmun, koofers, rateteachers)

• Share resources: movies (youtube),pictures (flickr), status (twitter), bookmarks (del.icio.us, stumbleupon), news (digg, reddit), citations (citeulike), exams (koofers), slides (slideshare)...

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citeulike.org• Bookmarking for references,

with support to export to EndNote, bibtex, etc.

• Supports “bookmarking” from popular cites, including ACM DL

• Power of social browsing, recommendations

• Create a “group” with your students and share references

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