Today I had fun working with a small group of teachers, in a workshop simply called  "Introduction to Blogging". This was intended to help people think about, and be confident enough to go back to school and get involved with blogging.

It's great to see teachers and teacher librarians volunteering to
come and learn these things!  With this training, and with those
who have already got their blogs under way, I am seeing a wave of interest in blogging and other social software.  After my presentation at the last large network meeting, I am finding others with whom I can talk about blogs, news feeds, tagging, flickr, de.lic.ious etc. 

Nice to know we have begun  thinking about and working with social software – and started to do new things. In this context I would highly recommend the article by Brian Alexander that appeared in Educause Review  Web 2.0: a New Wave of Innovation for Teaching and Learning?  Vol. 41, no. 2 (March/April 2006): 32–44.  You can read this online here or download the pdf file. Though written for the Higher Education sector, the article provides a comprehensive overview of social software and Web 2.0, and asks some challenging questions about the implications of these developments for education.

"The term is audacious: Web 2.0. It assumes a certain interpretation of Web history, including enough progress in certain directions to trigger a succession. The label casts the reader back to Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s unleashing of the World Wide Web concept a little more than a decade ago, then asks: What forms of the Web have developed and become accepted enough that we can conceive of a transition to new ones?"

Grab this article and check out the other issues for more treasure.