[web 2.0 tools and education]

I've been reading the JISC report on Web 2.0 for Content for Learning and Teaching in
Higher Education and on page 8 the authors have this useful list of ideas on how to use certain web 2.0 tools to facilitate learning. None of them are new to me but still good ideas. I'd be interested to hear what innovative uses other educators are coming up with.

Podcasts can be used to provide introductory material before lectures, or, more commonly, to record lectures and allow students to listen to the lectures again, either because they were unable to attend, or to reinforce their learning. Podcasts can be used to make lectures redundant while still supplying (possibly didactic) presentations of learning material by lecturers.
· Vidcasts can be used to supply to supply videos of experimental procedures in advance of lab sessions
· Podcasts can be used to supply audio tutorial material and/or exemplar recordings of native speakers to foreign language learners.
· Distribution and sharing of educational media and resources. For example, an art history class could have access to a set of art works via a photo sharing system.
· The ability to comment on and critique each others work; including by people on other courses or at other institutions.
· Flickr allows for annotations to be associated with different areas of an image and for comments to be made on the image as a whole, thereby facilitating teacher explanations, class discussion, and collaborative comment. It could be used for the example above.
· For Flickr, FlickrCC18 is a particularly useful ancillary service that allows users to find Creative Commons licensed images that are freely reusable as educational resources.
· Instructional videos and seminar records can be hosted on video sharing systems. Google Video allows for longer higher quality videos than YouTube, and contains a specific genre of educational video

"Education in every country and in every epoch has always been social in nature. Indeed, by its very essence it could hardly exist as anti-social in anyway. Both in the seminary and in the old high school, in the military schools and in the schools for the daughters of the nobility [...] it was never the teacher or the tutor who did the teaching, but the particular social environment in the school which was created for each individual instance" ~~Vygotsky