Web2.0 Participant's Testamonial

This is an acknowledgement from a participant in one of the Web2.0 short courses, The participant, Ian Cosmas, who is an academic staff of the university put out this acknowledgement in the university's email. It is encouraging and i have taken the liberty to post verbatim the acknowledgement email here.

Dear Dora/Ismael/David,

I just returned from attending the Web 2.0 Social Media Technologies used in Education and Learning course which ended yesterday.

I'd like to thank you all for organising courses that benefit staff. 

Although I am aware of Web 2.0 in theory (and some of the others also are), the course was practical and enabled us to practically apply the Web 2.0 social media technologies.  The social media tools learnt can be immediately applied in an educational context to facilitate online and real time collaboration, research and learning in the University amongst staff and students.

It is pleasing to see what is happening now to upgrade the Web 2.0 computer skills of staff in the campus.  The world is fast evolving and technology is a key enabler for change in institutions and organisations globally, and PNG is no exception. The introduction of these technologies in various departments will foster a change in teaching and learning in terms of quality education as well as the improvement of current academic processes.  

I envisage that after staff and students are trained in the use of Web 2.0 social media technologies and Google Classroom, we should start to see the emergence of the modern, digitally driven University of Technology - we can start to live up to our name, i.e. "The University of Technology". 

I do understand that there is still fair bit of work to be done such as the departmental network upgrades which need to happen so the departmental networks sync with the 03b satellite broadband network.  Having said that, we have removed the biggest hurdle and have good progress so far in terms of the implementation of the O3b Satellite Broadband network. 

Thanks

Ian

IT Lecturer - MCSEM, MACS (CT)

Web 2 and Cloud Computing

This post is a general commentary on Web 2 and Cloud Computing based on personal general observation.

The worldwide web or simply the web may now be categorized into a series of stages of expansions of web applications beginning with web 1  to web 2  and on to cloud computing. These series of expansions indicate stages of development of applications which allow the internet users more flexibility, and of course opportunities, to participate on the web using a wide array of applications linked together by a series of interconnected servers around the world. It allows the user to store and exchange data or information in the computer hard drive as well as on storage devices on the cloud. That is why it is now referred to as cloud computing. 

Now one does not have to depend entirely on carrying a flash drive or other external storage devices. You may use these external storage devices to store personal documents that you do no want to share with others via cloud storage devices.

Web 2 applications allow the academic the opportunity to share and exchange ideas with colleagues from the same institutions and others around the world. Blogs, Google Drive and Dropbox are some of the applications that a teacher can use to share and exchange ideas with colleagues.