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October 23, 2006, 12:43 PM ET
What "Web 2.0" Can Teach Professors
During a speech today at the League for Innovation’s Conference on Information Technology, held here in Charlotte, N.C., Ellen Wagner took her audience on a guided tour of “Web 2.0” — a term applied to a broad range of Web sites that encourage interaction and collaborative work. Ms. Wagner, the senior director of worldwide-learning solutions at Adobe Systems, ran through a list of Web stalwarts (like the Encyclopaedia Britannica’s online edition) and pointed out that they’d been trumped by sites that encourage users to create their own content (like Wikipedia, the popular open-source encyclopedia).
Professors can learn a lot from Web 2.0 enterprises like Digg, the technology-news aggregator, and Second Life, the fast-growing virtual world, Ms. Wagner said. By connecting users to online communities, she said, those services provide more memorable learning experiences than students may get from more-entrenched, less-interactive technologies.
Web 2.0 may be a hot property among techies, but academics, it seems, have been a bit slower to embrace user-generated content. When Ms. Wagner sought attendees who regularly read Wikipedia, the popular open source, only a few people raised their hands to plead guilty. And when she asked if anyone in the audience had gone so far as to edit articles on the Web site, no hands went up at all. —Brock Read
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