We’re selecting books to recommend for the upcoming TLT Symposium, and we thought we would blog about some of them. One of our likely selections will be Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and Other Powerful Web Tools for the Classroom by Will Richardson.
Should you buy?
This book is written for the instructor who is completely new to the Web 2.0 world. If you’ve heard of “blogs” and “wikis” only as buzzwords, but want to know more, this is for you. </p?
I should mention that it’s aimed for a K-12 instructor audience, but I think most of the principles apply to higher education. It starts out with definitions of the terms, adds educationally sound examples then shows you some tools to get you started. It also covers issues important to instructors such as making sure students understand the rules of blogging in your course. It also has great coverage of one of the most important “hidden” technologies – RSS.
Another great feature is that it’s short and to the point, and for busy instructors, this could be the tipping point of whether the book gets read or not. But short does not mean incomplete – far from it. Richardson manages to touch on blogs, wikis, podcasting, RSS, tagging, mashups, social bookmarking (aka del.icio.us) and image galleries (aka “Flickr”). I think this is a book that will help you “get” Web 2.0.
The other good news is that even if you’ve become “Web 2.0” savvy, you’ll still find great examples and new tools to consider. Even now, I’m looking at Flickr in a new way.
Sumamry
This is great for the Web 2.0 newbie who needs it all explained and helpful for Web 2.0 veterans who can always a few more new ideas.