Wired Covers Education on the Web 2.0

Josh Fremoso at Wired gives a great overview of educational resources on the internet, especially those invoking the targeted and collaborative principles of Web 2.0. It's the final chapter of his week-long "Education 2.0" feature, which has been a great read.

My take is that Education is an area in which the web has greatly underachieved to date. It's not a matter of the medium's inability to capture youthful eyeballs; Facebook and Myspace and others have done just fine in that department. But I suspect the most-used web resources for anything Education-related are probably Google and Wikipedia; absolutely nothing wrong with that, but if kids and other lifelong learners have learned to look no further than the basic search engines for research, it might mean that web resources haven't made themselves relevant (and that students are generally lazy and looking for a quick answer, if not the best).

Besides, direct research by learners is only one aspect of it. That's why I like the idea behind Curriki.org; it's a collaborative wiki (not collaborative enough, as Fremoso points out, but a great start nonetheless) that helps teachers develop better lesson plans on a range of topics. Web 2.0 goes beyond the end customer; students benefit from better teachers if teachers are sharing their plans on Curriki. (Of course, I'm not a teacher, so I don't know how applicable this really is.)

PS I quickly found great activity for a high school audience on the economics, costs and benefits of owning a business, provided by Darry Trampe from the Nebraska Council on Economic Education via the Consortium for Entrepreneurship Education.