OK – an attempt here to summarise some of the Web 2.0 stuff from the Birds of a Feather session. I know I’ll have missed some of it so please feel free to add to the comments if you can think of anythi
ng 
What is Web 2.0?
There seemed to be a consensus of opinion here that it is pretty much ‘that which is beyond the VLE’. Primarily the collaborative tools out there in clouds – including but not limited to:
- Blogs
- Wikis
- Social networks
- You Tube
- Flickr
- …and so on…
There was defnitely a consensus that you could have ‘owned’ Web 2.0 technologies and so hosting your own blogs, wikis etc counted as Web 2.0.
Right – sorry to belabour that somewhat basic point but it probably has baring on some of the later points…
Conflict #1 – control vs freedom
One of the definining features of the Web 2.0 world is freedom – the freedom to choose one app over another, to grab what works for you and to grab something else when your needs change. This is all very well but it does lack consistency and control. If you have 100 academics using 300 tools between them then how can you support that…. and how can a student remember their details on all of those different sites? Most people seem keen to solve this problem by introducing ‘preferred’ or ’supported’ Web 2.0 tools that they will push to their staff in favour of others that can’t be as readily supported. This would seem to harness the middle ground, not prohibiting other tools but offering the carrot of support to those staff who fall in with the party line…
Of course – life would be easier if the major Web 2.0 players could adopt some degree of uniforimity in access APIs (OpenID etc) and in terms and conditions. This might well be an area where UCISA and similar bodies can push a UK HE agenda to the majore players.
Legalities
One of the issues that, understandably, worries a lot of folks are the legal implications of using Web 2.0 technology – particularly out in the cloud. It was noted that one UK Academic has already been successfully sued for comments placed on a forum he controlled (not placed by him). In this area, JISClegal already have a host of information and are rapdily growing the area. Their pages can be found at: http://www.jisclegal.ac.uk/Themes/Web20.aspx
The key point here is that staff and students need to be educated in the legal and social aspects of Web 2.0 technology as well as in the technical aspects. Can we leave it up to them to figure out? Only at our peril.
Non-academic/social use
Some discussion was had about use of Web 2.0 apps in non-academic and non-social situations and Huddersfield’s library was brought to our attention where they have a number of Amazon-inspired Web 2.0 features including “people who borrowed this also borrowed…”. In addition to that a number of institutions were using collabourative tools to help form policies and documents, especially wikis and blogs. Blogs were also used by some institutions as a communications stream between staff. And, of course, for disseminating conference information 
The group thought this was an area where the technology might be more heavily leveraged but that non-academic staff were generally more liable to follow senior management trends than their academic counterparts and that progress was likely to be quicker if senior managers could be persuaded to use the technologies. And so we’re back to senior managers blogging – I must try and find some champions when I get back to the office. I’m sure I can persuade one or two to give it a whirl.
Visibility
In addition to senior management buy-in it was thought that visibility for Web 2.0 tools could be greatly enhanced by tying them in with key systems such as SRS, VLE and Library systems.
The Future
It seems that most people are still trying to work out quite what their Web 2.0 strategies should be (or even whether they should have one or roll it into eLearning strategy) and that that is the immediate future for them. For the majority of those present at the sessions, a limited product set of ’supported’ platforms was in the near future with a number wondering if Web 2.0 technologies might be an answer to expensive VLE licensing. That, though depends on having tools to pull the product sets together, adequate legal frameworks and some consistent approach to single-sign on across the toolset. Hopefully UCISA and similar bodies will be able to help with some of those.
Some of the same issues arose in the Collaboration Tools BoaF session at the conference and I wonder what we make as the distinction between these. Our TULIP portal that supports cross business processes looks rather dated now with its basic web interface, so we have been looking at new technologies to give it that web 2.0 look and feel. A combination of php/javascript with some Ajax and open source stuff and the Oracle database underneath) has demonstrated that we can embed some of the essence of web 2.0 in actual business applications (we are looking at curriculum management as a collaborative process rather than a workflow).
The VLE world seems to have shot itself in the foot with high cost versus poor delivery and a non-competitative market place. Maybe time is ripe for a monster Google Moodle to take over the world of learning? I want the credit for the name if it happens!
Yes – I think a lot of people are looking at web 2.0 to shape business practice as well as application design/delivery. We’re finding wikis a wonderful fit for collaborative document/procedure design. They seem to fit the bill better than any workflow/document management solution we’ve found so far. Value-for-money definitely plays a part but I think that the inherent agility of web 2.0 style tools.
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