If you want a wonderful Web 2.0 working example to explore or show people, have a look at www.librarything.com – a great big book club where you show off your library, tag your readings, explore the million or more other book entries and converse with people in the hundreds of groups of like-minded readers. This is my tag cloud. Don’t laugh.

This is a Web 2.0 application that even the most elite elitist will appreciate, because there is a long tradition of people discussing books in a discussion group. The beauty of if is that I don’t have to mix with the people who loved The DaVinci Code, I can go off and form a group of people who like my kind of book.

This seem to me to be the way to persuade teachers and others that something new is happening with Web 2.0. Get them to look at a site like this, and they will Get IT.

Tiddlywiki is an amazing little piece of free software that is an excellent personal notebook, or journal. It is also not easy to describe because it does not quite fit into a neat category. It is a wiki, and a stand-alone html file, it can be located on the web and have many authors, and it can be a personal file that you carry around as a ‘wiki-on-a-stick’.

If you click on the link above you can try out the navigation for yourself. A tiddlywiki is made up of ‘tiddlers’ which are usually paragraph length entries. These have their own tags (on the right of the illustration) and they are linked to and closed as you like. A main menu is on the left. It is wonderful for adding material to your personal notebook. Just create a new tiddler, add some tags to it, and you are done. You can find all your records on a particular topic or topics simply by clicking on a tag.

If you want to have a go, on the Home site, see Getting Started, and in the body of that you will find Download Software and an empty.html that you download and is your starting point. In about 30 minutes you will have mastered the basics.

The best web information site I have seen over the last year is TED. Just put ted in Google and it is the top entry. TED (Technology Entertainment Design) has the slogan, ‘Ideas worth spreading’. It revolves around a conference held in California once a year. They invite some of the brightest people in the world to speak for just 14 minutes each. This is videoed. and the resulting audio and video podcasts or downloads are freely available.

So what do you get from some great achievers in just 14 minutes – stimulated, excited, inspired. That’s what has happened to me over an over again. It helps if you have a video ipod, but you can watch them on a computer. Most of them would work fine in just audio format because while they do use some presentation images, most are just a very stimulating person talking about their achievements.

When you look at the list of speakers, few are recognisable to most of us, but I found that by listening to the first few minutes of each speaker you soon find out whether the topic is of interest to you. I watch about two thirds of them all the way through.

I suggest starting with Ken Robinson (on the importance of educating for creativity – very wise and very funny) and Julia Sweeney (very funny, on religion).

Apart from the intrinsic interest in the content of the talks, what the have done with TED is an inspiring example of the power of the new technologies. They have found a way to present very powerful ideas in a very accessible way to a vast number of people. I could go on and on about individual talks. Have a look, and add comments on your favourite. Don’t miss E O Wilson, a delightful old chap who I have discovered since is considered by some to be Darwin’s successor, one of the world’s greatest scientists and who’s accompanying video on the mini world of biology is a delight.

Technology Review had a powerful criticism of Vista in Feb from a professed windows fan, Erika Jonietz here. In the April edition the editors said they had their strongest reader response ever to this article, because, I guess, it was such a powerful critique.

They then invited one of their editors to respond which he does here ( rather tepid support I thought) and below, all the responses from the masses. As a Mac owner I am of course completely neutral in this debate.

The word bloated was used a lot!

I’m feeling slightly smug that twenty years ago when computers were mere babies in schools, I wrote a little column in an educational journal titled ‘Clayton’s Computer’. At the time everyone in Australia knew Clayton’s as the name of a non-alcoholic drink (’The drink you have when you are not having a drink.’) Readers understood ‘Clayton’ as a euphemism for pretending, or fakery. So the hero of my column was Clayton, a teacher who used computers extensively in his teaching, but at a quite shallow level, replicating traditional teaching with the aid of a computer, gaining a (fake) reputation as a trendy modern teacher using computers to enrich learning.
Sadly, the Claytons have multiplied in education systems all around the world in the years since then: sometimes cynically, but more often innocently as teachers and administrators strive to bolt new technologies onto traditional teaching practices, and find that very little changes.

Using a word processor to prepare a report has significant advantages over writing it by hand, but the task and the outcome are essentially the same, so any learning gains are small. But the cost of the computer is significant. We don’t get real gains in using computers in education until the power of the computer is used to move to a higher level of learning activity. And that’s hard to achieve because the whole system is determined to resist change. That’s what has fascinated me over the last twenty years – to contest between entrenched educational practice and the onrush of computing innovation that is changed just about every aspect of society – except for schools.