Web 2.0: Big app on campus

Aus cnet news: “When I was in college, there was this one classmate everyone found especially annoying. Quite the little joiner, she would post opinions of dubious intellectual worth on the class message board just to show that she did the reading and to puff herself up with some tangentially relatedstory.

Condescending Generation X classmates, including me, saw her as uncouth. Apparently, she was simply ahead of her time. Gen X cynicism has given way to millennial self-absorption as a new generation’s lust for celebrity spreads to college classrooms, say educators. Now, universities are hoping to tap into that urge with new technologies to recruit prospective students and entice current students to stretch their intellect.

“A lot of students…like showing off their work. They like being published. They like being on display,” said Barbara Knauff, senior instructional technologist at Dartmouth College. Other educators, echoing Knauff’s comments, see the enticement of notoriety through Web 2.0-style social tools–blogs, wikis and the like–as a way to engage students in their education and maybe even get them to choose one school over another …”