The Tools of Web 2.0

Blogging has been around and is nothing new. A blog allows the author to connect with a group of readers by writing a post. Readers respond to the post by adding their comments. Readers become aware of new posts and responses through a RSS (Real Simple Syndication) feed. Additional tools that extend the information community are social bookmarking, mash-ups, tagging, and wikis to just name a few of the new web appliances that are becoming available.

Education 2.0 is not a response to some "failure" of public education. It is not an attempt to comply with some aspect of No Child Left Behind. The idea of Web 2.0 was first floated by Tim O'Reilly. Web 2.0 provides professional educators with the ability to extend education beyond the physical and time constraints of the analog classroom.

In Uses and Potentials of Wikis in the Classroom, S. Pixy Ferris and Hilary Wilder state,

An alternative model of education that may be better suited to the cyber age would take advantage of secondary orality, which relies on the affordances of print culture but also reintroduces the value of such oral characteristics as communality, group-sense, and participation (Ong 1982). Additionally, secondary orality promotes self-awareness, magnanimity, responsibility, reasonability, and the development of a "world-cultural consciousness" (Gronbeck, Farrell,and Soukup 1991). Secondary orality is uniquely a product of the twentieth century, in which advancements in electronic technology created the conditions for a resurgence and reshaping of the oral characteristics of pre- or low-literate cultures. In a secondary-oral model, learners assume ownership of knowledge within learning experiences that encourage them to engage with texts electronically.

Secondary orality is another way to describe the commons. It helps explain the necessity of including Web 2.0 in the educational environment.