John Pearce here from Geelong in Australia.
I am already sold on the potential for all of this Web 2.0 stuff and feel really sorry for the majority of students whose teachers, (and prospective teachers), are not in any shape or form aware of the possibilities out there. I am lucky that I have a grade of children willing to "go for the ride" with me and we are blogging, podcasting, have a couple of wikis, prefer to "wikipedia" rather than "Google" and are at me to get videocasting happening. On Thursday last I spoke to a group of pre-service teachers just about to graduate around the work that my students and others have been doing and in a room of 30+ there were only two bloggers, one who knew of wikipedia, none who acutally had participated in a wiki, one who knew of social bookmarking, none who had thought about making a podcast and about ten who knew what a podcast was. Interesting, especially as our school has in fact hired two of them for next year, (our school is a high performance school which tends to take the best of the crop). Hmmmmm Maybe I should have included David's keynote movie on the resource CD I gave them all :)