For the last two years Michael has asked all his information technology students to keep a blog for assessment in each course that he teaches. He uses several other social media tools in his teaching, notably wikis, shared bookmarks and social networks, and is progressively integrating these tools into the new approach being referred to as Education 2.0. Michael has a particular interest in screencasting for student instruction and revision purposes. In a consultancy role he gives regular presentations to his university colleagues and local high school teachers on the use of cloud computing and social media tools in the education environment.

There is a growing proliferation of cloud computing applications for business and personal use such as Google Apps, the impressive Zoho suite and the coming Office Essentials from Microsoft – the online versions of part of the Office suite. In combination with social media tools for internal and customer communication these cloud computing applications can provide all-of-business support for small and medium sized businesses. Michael is currently developing training materials in this space and aims to begin offering consultancy and presentations in the near future.

As an aside in 1995 Michael and a PhD student happened to be the first people to use the word ‘weblog’ for an online meetings support system, one of the precursors to blogs that started to appear in 1997. Details appear in a blog entry.

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