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Lauren Pressley and I led six workshops over three consecutive days this week on web 2.0 topics. These sessions came out of discussions with various members of the campus community who expressed an interest in learning more about everything from social networking applications to creating a podcast. The six workshops were:

1. An Introduction to Web 2.0
2. Social Networking Applications (Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, LinkedIn)
3. Google for Collaboration,
4. Blogs, Wikis, and Podcasting at ZSR
5. Using Web 2.0 Content
6. Web 2.0 and Instructional Design

Each session was 90 minutes in length, offering an opportunity to expand beyond the standard lecture format and include more active learning exercises in each session. In the Social Networking Applications workshop I led, the class was given basic instruction on the various applications, then broken into groups that explored a particular application. After exploring that application for 45 minutes the groups gave presentations to the class on that particular social networking application. This gave everyone the chance to explore the application of their choice while still learning about the other applications from the group presentations. The participants were nervous about this format at first, but adjusted quickly as the group began exploring the various applications. Lauren tried a similar model for her session on “Blogs, Wikis and Podcasting at ZSR”, allowing the participants to “play” in our sandbox environment after learning a bit about these tools. For the workshop on “Using Web 2.0 Content” we explored RSS feeds, iGoogle and the actual equipment (camcorders, audio recorders) used to create this content.

All in all it was a successful series of workshop, attended by a variety of staff and faculty. I enjoyed incorporating content from the “Teaching Teaching” workshops Lauren and Roz led in the Spring. We hope to repeat this series of workshops in the Fall semester.