Web 2.0 Goes to School

The fun part of Web 2.0 has always been its informality. Everyone from middle-school students to PhDs putting together sophisticated mashups and building unique social networks--and some (well, a couple anyway) of them even picking up $1.6 billion and change.

That informality is changing, however, as evident with the launch of a collaborative initiative between IBM and the University of Arizona to develop a course aimed at helping developers build online communities and social network systems using Web 2.0 technologies and blogs, wikis, online social networking, and podcasting.

Co-developed by the U of A Management Information Systems(MIS) Department and IBM, the course will address topics such as:

• The role of online communities in business
• Common types of community tools and environments
• Making successful communities

The class will culminate in a final project where students from the class works with their own separate group of students from Howenstine High School in Tucson, Arizona, to organize into many micro-communities. This offers hands-on experience in leadership, communications and community-building skills. Each high-school student will also learn how to use social software towards the goals of their community. This partnership between industry, university-level education and high schools aims to encourage greater interest in the field of Information Technology at one stage earlier in a student's academic career, with hopes to encourage other universities to adopt a similar model.

In addition to the new course materials, students and faculty members can access IBM's developerWorks to help them implement and develop dynamic web applications using development technologies such as Ajax, PHP, and Ruby, available in the developerWorks recently launched Web development zone.

The growing use of social and community systems in businesses to support customers, users, and the general public, is creating an increasing demand for the job role of a "community manager." The new course enables students to explore and recognize various online collaboration tools and social software to provide an understanding of how they are used in businesses today. In addition, the classes are structured to promote leadership qualities, collaboration, and peer-interaction. Students are expected to carry out a number of group assignments and projects, as well as individual presentations.

According to the Gartner Group, by 2008 the majority of Global 1000 companies will quickly adopt several technology-related aspects of Web 2.0 to advance their businesses. As companies increase their reliance on new Web-based technologies to capitalize on new business opportunities, the industry is showing greater demand for technology experts who can build and manage Web 2.0 resources including wikis, blogs, user groups and forums. The IBM/University of Arizona partnership is supposedly the first of its kind to bring these principles to the classroom, giving students early exposure to influential, emerging technologies. This is also the first in a new suite of courses from the MIS Department related to managing and marketing online services.

Posted by Jon Erickson at 10:20 AM  Permalink