Education 2.0: Bringing Innovation to the Classroom

There has been a long waiting for computers to dramatically change education, but for the most part, that promise remains unfulfilled for various reasons. Perhaps the most important of them is the fact that, there hasn't been - so far - a computer application that would universally alter the educational experience. One that will make us stop seeing computers as an add-on, and start seeing them as integral to the full educational process. The advent of the Internet, however, and in particular what we are calling “Web 2.0”, has so significantly changed our relationship to information and our own personal learning opportunities outside of formal education, that we're beginning to see a set of software tools emerge that are profoundly altering both learning processes and outcomes. In this paper the innovation that Web 2.0 brings to the classroom is discussed mostly from the technological point of view.