During the 25 years that I have delivered professional development activities for educators, I have always tried to model the technologies and techniques that I was teaching. In recent years, the efforts have had less to do with specific technologies, software products, services, and much more to do with philosophies where learning happens as part of continuing and multi-dimensional conversations among learners and teachers, and others on the Net. This is what the emerging new web, web 2.0 has done to my vision of education.
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In the beginning, the World Wide Web (WWW) was flat. It was an electronic library where academics and scientists posted dissertations and dusty data for reading with clunky, text-only browsers. With the advent of graphical browsers, the consumer oriented Web took off. Content became vastly more colorful. Remember where you were the first time you experienced the exciting blink and marquee tags? (I bet you wish you could forget those gems!) Anyway, the Web has evolved as a rich, interactive, and personalized medium. In the new version of Web (Web 2.0), functional pages aren’t enough. User experience (abbreviated as UX in geekspeak) is hot, and sites are cool. This chapter looks at Microsoft’s tools and technologies for creating and delivering engaging Web content.
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ConXML is an XML format used to describe conversational applications between people and services using clients such as the mobile phone messaging, instant messenger, and email. It allows conversational applications to be developed and deployed in an analogous way to HTML for visual applications. Many kinds of ConXML applications can be developed. These applications can include: content sharing, event management, polling, order inquiry, package tracking, driving directions, emergency notification, fiight tracking, customer relationship management, prescription refilling, audio newsmagazines, real-estate information and national directory assistance applications.
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