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ongoing chronicle of information. A blog is a frequently updated, personal website featuring diary-type commentary and links to articles or other websites (and, in the case, of video-blogging, video). Given the personal perspectives presented on blogs, they often generate ongoing discourse and a strong sense of community. Blogs provide diverse, alternative sources of information for higher education, as well as providing tools that can be used by academics and students for a wide range of educational purposes.
- Wikis – a wiki enables documents to be written collaboratively, in a simple mark-up language using a web browser. A defining characteristic of wiki technology is the ease with which pages can be created and updated. This ease of interaction and operation makes a wiki an effective tool for mass collaborative authoring, the most famous example of which is Wikipedia, an online phenomenon that has played a massive role in challenging notions of what constitutes 'expertise' and about reliability of information. Wikis are already extensively used in many higher education programmes for educational purposes, and are one of the authoring tools being used to generate 'open' content (see below).
- RSS – Real Simple Syndication (RSS) is a protocol that allows users to subscribe to online content by creating lists of preferred sources of information in a 'reader' or 'aggregator' that automatically retrieves content updates, saving users time and effort. RSS feeds can be very helpful in managing information and undertaking ongoing research.
- Podcasting – 'podcasting' refers to any combination of hardware, software, and connectivity that permits automatic download of (usually free) audio and video files to a computer, smart phone, or MP3/MP4 player to be listened to or watched at the user's convenience. This is typically done by subscribing to an RSS feed linked to the specific podcast, so that when new editions of a podcast are made available, they are automatically downloaded by podcasting software. Podcasting has made available a very broad spectrum of educationally useful audio and video material, including radio programmes from around the world, lectures, conference speeches, and custom-produced podcasts created by enthusiasts. Growing numbers of universities and academics are making lectures available as podcast series usually making these freely available to anyone around the world with Internet access.
- Virtual Worlds – virtual worlds are immersive online environments whose 'residents' are avatars representing individuals who participate via the Internet. Some, such as the very popular World of Warcraft, are explicitly focused on gaming and entertainment. However, possibly the most well known of these from an educational perspective is Second Life, a fully threedimensional world where users with many varying interests interact, but within which many universities and businesses are now constructing virtual campuses for their students.
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