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.

I have long abandoned the print handout, using it only under those conditions where they are expressly requested by the people who pay me for my services. Otherwise, I point to my web site at the beginning of the presentation demonstrating links to web pages that provide a variety of digital resources for the topic at hand. Until recently, these have been static html documents or pages that were derived from content management systems.

The first time that I installed a wiki engine on my web server and produced a web page that could be edited by any visitor to that page, I saw this as the perfect vehicle for providing access to digital content for my workshop participants within the context of education as conversation philosophy mentioned above.

Fairly early in the evolution of my wiki handouts, I selected MediaWiki (http://mediawiki.org/) as the engine for my online handouts. Its robustness, richness, availability of various extensions that have been developed by an open-source community of programmers, and security features were among the reasons why I chose this product. An additional features that the familiarity that many people already have with its editing process, since MediaWiki is the engine used by the Wikipedia (http://wikipedia.org/).

Initial, I left editing wide open for my online handouts, so that teacher participants would be able to easily add and edit content on the handouts. This did not last long, as spambots quickly found the site, adding online gambling and fairly disturbing pornography to my growing list of handouts. I switched the login feature on, and set up a generic account, with an easy to remember login, teacher, and equally easy to remember password, teacher. I added a note to the top of each of the pages reminding users of the login and password, wanting to keep participant in the handouts conversation as simple as possible.

Download pdf Web 2.0 Handouts