I agree wholeheartedly with both yourself and Emma that it’s not about the tools themselves, but about the capabilities the tools enable.

I am also Teaching Fellow at the Department of Information Studies at Aberystwyth University. One of my main research topics is the use of social media in organisations from a records management point of view and, as Juanita mentioned, I am currently developing a module that will look into social media, its uses in society, organisations etc. We are also going to revive a discontinued module on electronic publishing that will now focus on social media such as blogs, wikis, websites, RSS, social bookmarking, photo sharing and podcasting. I have a feeling that quite a few academic institutions are beginning to look into the whole ‘web 2.0′ arena but as ever it takes time to catch up and to develop suitable modules that effectively integrate social media use into the teaching agenda – there is always a danger of practising something popular as l’art pour l’art. It is, however, great to see social media in use and I was impressed by the activity on the twitter stream for cilip2. I find it interesting that the library sector seems to be on the forefront of using it to interact with ‘customers’ or readers, students etc. and hope too that more can come out of the momentum we generated just now. I am interested in all your thoughts and suggestions on how to use web 2.0 in the academic, library or even organisational environment and if you feel like it you could tweet me your thoughts @nicoleschu.

Juanita – I agree that the tools should not be used for the sake of it but must support the learning. It’s exactly the same in the library – web2.0 tools should only be used where they add value to your service rather than for the sake of jumping on the bandwagon.

One of my colleagues is working on a Web 2 module, so it will be coming into the curriculum too.

So it is getting into the curriculum, and I hope will become more widespread too. The point though is not the tool in itself, but to what extent it supports the pedagogy and the learning. I think a number of these tools do support this in LIS and so I will be using them as appropriate.

And for those of you wanting to see how they can be used in a library environment I recommend following Mashed Library 2009, #mashlib09 http://mashlib09.wordpress.com/ there are still some places available for students on LIS courses so you have a chance to get involved.