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Hi Jacquie, and Gary, and all! I am so glad you brought up the subject of Web 2.0! I see greatchanges coming down the road this year and one of them is theread/write Web. I interviewed EdTechTalk's (http://edtechtalk.com)Dave Cormier for an upcoming column and he offered what I found aparticularly clear explanation: Web 2.0. The term refers to what many people see as a second phase inWeb development, where the Web itself functions as a computingplatform. Cormier claims that 2005 was, the year of the read/write weband further explains the evolution. "With Web 1.0, the creator of thewebsite controls the content; with Web 2.0, the visitors control thecontent. Few websites now don't at least give you the chance to playwith their themes, if not create content." Dave's Top Ten News Events of the Edublog Year are listed here:http://davecormier.com/edblog/?p=38 . Several of these trends and extensions of them ought to be part of ourown scouting and visioning efforts. We need to recognize the value ofOpen Source software (some of my favorites arehere--http://mciu.org/~spjvweb/opensource.html) as an equity solutionfor our schools and our individual students. We need to figure out how to integrate the new connectivist tools. High school Facebook activities worry me a bit, but the new ElggLearning Landscape (http://elgg.net/) offers students a moreprotected, but cool, peer-inhabited blogging community. Similarly, itseems to me that while LiveJournal, Xanga, and Myspace are often alittle less than school-appropriate, we can help kids learn to blog(and write) thoughtfully, for real audiences using tools likeLearnerblogs.org and create virtual learning environments using Moodle(http://moodle.org ). I think we need to look down the road at wikis for school projects. And we need to think about how wikibooks and wikitextbooks(http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page) will integrate into theclassroom environment. They can help us supplement already adoptedtexts, allowing teachers and students to share, customize, enhance andincrease the relevance of this often static content. (Of course,evaluation for both teachers and students will be part of this mix.) Cormier also pointed out that this was the year of the browser-basedapplication, pointing to programs like Writelyhttp://www.writely.com/, the Web word processor and Odeohttp://odeo.com/ for recording and sharing audio. He predicts, "thedesktop-based application may soon become a thing of the specialistand the uncool. We may soon be looking back on 2005 and saying, 'Man,I was still using applications… what a pain (in the *#*)'" jJoyce Kasman ValenzaSpringfield Township HS Library techlife@schoolPhiladelphia InquirerPhone: 215-233-6030 Ext. 2502 Fax: 215-836-5237Library website: http://mciu.org/~spjvweb Personal website:http://joycevalenza.comDoctoral student UNT SLIS