The Web Explorer

INTRODUCTION

Educators have been trying to modularize and share learning content since the introduction of online learning. However, they have met several difficulties in both cultural and technological aspect, in order to support learning through the use of reusable, stand-alone, digital assets. Fortunately the advancement of technology especially in web platform (Web 2.0) provides tools for packaging and delivering web-based educational content in easier way. O’Reilly (2005) states six core competencies of the Web 2.0 environment:

· services, not packaged software,

· an architecture of participation,

· cost-effective scalability,

· re-mixable data source and data transformations,

· software above the level of a single device, and

· harnessing collective intelligence.

O’Reilly put special emphasis on the last item, explaining how it seems the central principle behind the success of the giants born in the Web 1.0 era who have survived to lead the Web 2.0 era appears to be that they have embraced the power of the web to harness collective intelligence. The move by some large universities towards digitization and open sharing of content indicates that value is not strictly tied only to content transfer, but rather value comes from a particular learning community that uses content in creative, interactive, and meaningful ways. And this requires more participation, collaboration, and flexibility in creation, adaptation, and use of learning materials. Blogs is one of web 2.0 platform that can be used for educational purposes, for example:

· A group of bloggers using their individual blogs can build up a corpus of interrelated knowledge via posts and comments. This might be a group of learners in a class, encouraged and facilitated by a teacher, or a group of relatively dedicated life-long learners.

· Teachers can use a blog for course announcements, news and feedback to students.

· Blogs can be used with syndication technologies (below) to enable groups of learners and teachers to easily keep track of new posts.

· Blog can be used as a repository platform, to keep and share the learning object material

WEB 2.0 PLATFORM SELECTIONS

A blog is a system that allows a single author (or sometimes, but less often, a group of authors) to write and publicly display time-ordered articles (called posts). Readers can add comment to posts to review, criticize, or praise the content. For blog platform, I have two option of blog system although there are a lot of free blogs providers in the market. Those two platforms are Blogspot and WordPress. Each software has both advantages and disadvantages. After several considerations, I have choosed WordPress as my blog platform. I prefer to choosed WordPress because it has 2 very important features that Blogger doesn’t yet support. The first feature; The WordPress can be set up to automatically ping the RSS and blog feed directory every time we make a new post. This feature is very important to raise the traffic and beside that, backlinks to our site is almost automatically to be created as well. The second feature and the most important feature that is needed for this project; The WordPress allows the use of categories. Categories are a good way to improve the structure of our site both for human visitors and for the search engines. I need this to classify my blog content into several major sciences.

SUBJECT SELECTION

This blog will consist of open content such as learning object material which is intended for the first and second semester sciences major students. Learning object is a shareable and reusable. The blog visitor or the blog reader can use or download the learning object for free. The learning material has several characteristics:

· Self-contained and ‘stand-alone’, so that it can be used independently or in combination (aggregated) with other objects as required.

· Available on demand across different learning systems.

· Containing sounds and/or still images, video clips, and simulations.

· Containing visualizations not exceeding 3 minutes of viewing.

· Designed for 30 minutes of study time.

For packaging format, we use internet standard multimedia content- Flash media (swf file). The learning material itself were taken from my previous project in PANDORA PROJECT (A Repository of Reusable Learning Object for Distance Learning in Asia ). In this project I was assigned as flash programmer. This project was a collaborative works that involved five open universities in Asia: Universitas Terbuka (UT) in Indonesia; Sukhothai Thammathirat Open University (STOU) in Thailand; Allama Iqbal Open University (AIOU) in Pakistan; and the Phnom Penh International University (PPIU) in Cambodia. The lead institution is UT. This blog will also consist of simple instruction about how to embed this object into some web pages.

CONCLUSION

And the last, this blog is intended to be a model for the implementation of Web 2.0 technology for education purposes. It promotes the trends of open, shareable, and reusable contents. I really hope that the visitor will take advantages from this site and willing to contribute and share their learning content as well. The blog can be accessed at http://lom.dimasap.web.id . The visitors are also permitted to register to the site and become the contributor of my site.