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.

INTRODUCTION

Learning is becoming increasingly easier due to the arrival and the evolution of many new technologies and a numerous of software. Web 2.0 is considered as the second generation of internet usage and Web 1.0 is the first generation. No longer getting one-way communication on the web; now Web 2.0 is about constructing knowledge collaboratively on the web. Web 2.0 is engaging and active compared to the passive and un-engaging Web 1.0 applications which ideal for the virtual learning. This kind of learning are made possible through advancements in technology. Web 2.0 applications (Facebook, MySpace, Blogs, Wiki’s, iGoogle, Flickr, RSS Feeds and YouTube. Etc) are effective teaching and pedagogical tools. These provide a platform for social networking through a medium that allows for sharing, informing, communicating and interacting. Web 2.0 requires active user’s participation in creating content (user generated content). In learning theories, importance of active participation, critical thinking, social presence, collaborative learning and two way communications are also underlined for quality learning (Beldarrin, 2006).

This paper is intended to give an example for how wiki could be implemented to build an online community. Building online learning community is one of the examples of web 2.0 adoption for educational purposes. A constructivist learning process occurs in online community because the characteristics of online community have similarities with the constructivism learning characteristic, for example:

· The member of the community is actively involve

· Online communities usually have democratic environment

· The content is user/member centered and the activity of the member are interactive

· Each member is encouraged to be autonomous and responsible. The community leader only serves as a moderator who manages and filter the flows of information (netiquette , unsolicited content)

WEB 2.0 PLATFORM SELECTIONS

Wiki is a system that allows one or more people to build a large collection of knowledge using process creating and editing pages. The content of knowledge is limited to specific subject that is being a main concern of the online community that builds a wiki site. The most famous wiki is Wikipedia with more than four million entries in four years. There are numerous hosting services that provide wiki service to the Internet user. This service can be obtained free of charge or pay a certain amount of cost depends on the features offered. Nevertheless, wiki services that are most frequently used by regular user are wikispaces (http://www.wikispace.com) and wiki-site (http://www.wiki-site.com ). Wiki-site is a wiki provider that offers wiki service that has the same engine with the well known wiki system – Wikipedia. Wikispaces launched in March 2005 and own by Tangient LLC is a hosting service based in San Francisco, California. Wikispaces provides free basic wikis with WYSIWYG editing to the general public under a Wikispaces sub domain. Wikispaces provides intuitive and easy to understand user interface. This is the main reason why I used Wikispaces for my wiki project.

SUBJECT SELECTION

Subject selection is the important point when want to build an online community. An online community can be formed when there are a number of people who have the same hobby, concern and interest to a specific subject, topic, or a problem and want to group so they can share and build collection of knowledge related to their interest. For this project, I choose Moodle LMS as a specific subject for my wiki. Moodle is one of popular open sourced based LMS (Learning Management System) and it is gaining popularity right now. I have experience using various LMS platforms from commercial to open source base and I found that Moodle is an interesting one. It is free and rich features comparable with commercial LMS. It is also easy to deploy and manage, have simple and easy to understand interface. For the people who have programming skills, Moodle has program library so they can modify, make a modules to enrich its features. And the best thing is its scalability; it fits from 10 to 100 thousand users. I would recommend Moodle for those institutions who want to start e-learning services but only had limited resources (limited funds, etc). Of course, this is based on my subjective opinion after trying various LMS. But unfortunately just the same with another open source software, it lacks witch vendor support. Some potential user may have to think twice before deploying a Moodle or migrating another LMS to Moodle because of that problem. By using a wiki, I hope I can make a simple solution to that problem by replacing ‘vendor support’ to ‘community support’. This wiki will act as a knowledge based management system so the community member can have an online resources repository which can help them solving their problem related to Moodle administration and usage. Internet user who have interest in Moodle can join the wiki by visiting http://wiki4moodle.wikispaces.com. I also provide access to Moodle site (http://learning.dimasap.web.id ). User who have interest in Moodle but do not have enough resources to make their own Moodle site can use this site for free.

CONCLUSION

Collaborative is the main key to make an online community to become more attractive and can survive in the Internet world when specific topic and tools are provided to extend the topic and to transform to other topics that are still relevant. The following are additional key points that are needed to build a good online community:

1. Ease of use. Rather than displaying a complex web page, wiki offers simple and easy to use text editor for day to day use.

2. Rule. Every community needs rules, including an online community. Make the rules simple and clear, and does not tempt people to intentionally violate it.

3. Extend it with real content. It is easier to join an existing conversation rather than make a new one. Build a community with a clear and directed topic.

REFERENCES

Parker, K. R., & Cao, J. T. (2007). Wiki as a Teaching Tool. Interdisciplinary Journal of Knowledge and Learning Objects , 3.

Usluel, Y. K., & Mazma, S. G. (2009). Adoption of Web 2.0 tools in distance education. International Journal of Human Sciences , 2, 89-98.

Yugma: the term ‘Yugma’ is from Sanskrit language, meaning “the state of being in unified collaboration”. Yugma offers a free service but with some features are disabled and only a maximum of 10 participants is allowed for a session, each participant has to register before he or she can participate. Software need to be downloaded and installed before being used. The installation process is very easy though may lead a problem to inexperienced user. Another drawback is no video call feature provided in Yugma. The speed and presentation quality are relatively good. Technology that is used by Yugma is from Skype, a well known voip and video conference provider.

Vyew: Vyew is another new comer in the web meeting market. It offers all of the features that Dimdim has offered and also provides a free service but with the limited features. The user interface is good and easy to use. In the free version, scheduling function is disabled. The users are allowed to create only one web meeting session. Voice and video quality are good but only offer one way communication (half duplex). To start voice communication, the users must push the talk button that is somewhat confusing to operate. Desktop sharing is buggy and I have experienced browser crash during the meeting session. I have also experienced slow response and lag when presenting slide show. Overall, Vyew is promising but with those bugs and limited features in free version, I still prefer to use Dimdim for my web meeting platform.