Online Web 2.0: Collaborative Workspaces and Learning through Stories

Web 2.0 refers to a new breed of on-line applications that support interactivity and rich media. Well known examples are Facebook, Flickr, and Picassa, but there are many other example out there. As well as being fun, these tools support communication and collaboration. They allow people to share ideas and allow vivid stories to be told from multiple perspectives.

These technologies have applications in learning / change programmes. They can be used in:

Action Learning.
Engagement and Communication: Allow groups to talk with the wider community.
Knowledge base / Content Management: Provide a vehicle to share knowledge and develop creative solutions and increase productivity.
Partnership / Team building building: Help project teams can carry forward ideas from workshops through to complete implementation.

And because they are computer-based the tool automatically create a history, which can act as an inspiration for problem solving and also provides an audit trail.

The tools are varied but in terms of learning and action solutions they can be categorised as:

Collaborative Workspaces contain glossaries, blogs, messaging, member databases, calendars, and galleries. They can be used to create collaborative / community websites.

Presentation Tools (Learning through Stories) allow images, videos, audio, and / or text to tell a story. These tools often contain comments section to allow viewers to interact and generate a dialogue.

"There have been civilizations that did not use the wheel,

but there are no civilizations that did not use story.” - Ursula Le Guin

Third Party Tools (Examples)

Name (Type)	Resouces
Slideshare (Presentation)	SlideShare claim they have the best way to share your presentations with the world. Let your ideas reach a broad audience. Share publicly or privately. Add audio.
OurStory (Timeline)	Place text and photos on to a timeline to tell the story of a community / project or the history of legislation.
Google Maps (Map based)	Not necessarily the easiest way to present an A-Z story, but digital maps provide the best way to represent spatial information.
WebSlides (Web links)	> Turn bookmarks and feeds into interactive slide shows > A new way of organizing, sharing, and presenting web content.

If you like to know more about our thoughts on Learning through Stories, drop us an email and we will send you a paper.

pfinfo@pixelfountain.co.uk