John from My Other Blog visited my city (Perth, Western Australia – he is from the East coast of Australia – Geelong, Victoria) last week to attend the 2007 World Conference on Science and Technology Education. His reflection on the conference was interesting – I believe he said there was about 1000 participants – but very low attendances at Web 2.0 sessions (Intro to Web 2.0 had 20 people; workshop setting up blogs aand wikis had 4 people; podcasting had 23 people). Of those that attended the sessions only 4 people had previous experience with blogs and podcasts.
In his reflections he ponders does this mean the majority of participants at the conference already knew about the potential of Web 2.0. Unfortunately like John I believe that most of the participants had no idea what is Web 2.0 or what are blogs, podcasts or wikis – hence how can they understand the potential.
How can we get our teachers to use Web 2.0 if they have no idea what it is about? Maybe we need to tackle showing people the potential of Web 2.0 differently; if our intended audience does not relate to terms like Web 2.0, podcasts, wikis, blogs then we need to think about what terms they would relate to so that they can learn about the potential of Web 2.0.
How can we hope for our kids to use blogs, wikis, podcasts etc at school if we can not get the message across to their teachers. Are your kids missing out – like mine?
Sue Waters 
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