It is a conglomerate term that suggests an updated teaching pedagogy, a transition to a student centered classroom and a combination of tools that are meant to facilitate learning. Technology alone cannot fix a broken lesson. Advanced computer-aided technology may however inspire a revolution in education that is situated in an authentic context and promotes the tenets of distributed cognition. The walls of our future classrooms are coming down and in their place a global collective intelligence will surmount. What is the future of educational technology? To answer this, you must begin with the past.
Looking back, Alexander (2006) credits JCR Licklider for dreaming up the idea of social networking.
Alexander (2006) states that Wikis first “hit the web in the late 1990s” (p.36.)
Blogs, according to Alexander (2008) “are a centerpiece to Web 2.0 taxonomy” (p.152).
On March 1, 2000 the Dot-com Crash marks the transition from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 (Pelkie, 2010).
Ludicorp, a Vancouver based company, developes the online game, Neverending.
Google launches AdSense, a Web 2.0 tool that links blog content with advertisements (Thompson, 2006).
Folksonomies, as defined by Alexander (2008), “consist of single words that users choose and apply to microcontent” (p.153).
Wordpress and MySpace are launched. Audioblogger is released and recognized as “the first major podcasting service for bloggers” (Boyer, 2011, heading 2003).
Facebook is launched.
Dale Dougherty coins the term Web 2.0 and Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly Media popularizes the term (Madden & Fox, 2006; Maness, 2006; O’Reilly & Battelle, 2009).
