Virtual Learning Commons for LTER IM: Vision and Web 2.0 Support
Information management plays a central role in supporting the broad temporal and spatial scale synthesis projects envisioned for the LTER. It is essential that all LTER scientists, students, and staff understand that LTER research and information management go hand-in-hand, and that the principles of information management practice be learned and applied by all LTER personnel. Educating this distributed population could be facilitated using the internet, and this working group focuses on the potential development of a Virtual Learning Commons for LTER information management, and how Web 2.0 tools could be implemented to support it.
While in the former web (“Web 1.0”) a few content providers generated web content for many passive users, in Web 2.0 many users create and consume web content. Web 2.0 tools include blogs; wikis; social bookmarking services; media-sharing services for podcasts, videos, documents, and photos; social-networking services; and collaborative editing services. In this workshop, we will begin by envisioning what a ‘Virtual Learning Commons’ would encompass without limiting our imaginations to available technologies. Then we will brainstorm about how Web 2.0 can be used to create the envisioned virtual learning commons. Results of this brainstorming effort are expected to be the inspiration for a proposal to study how Web 2.0 technologies can be employed to foster collaborative learning about information management within the international LTER community.