Education, Web 2.0, & Yahoo!

The recent announcement that Yahoo! and the University of California, Berkeley will open a joint research facility-Y! Research Labs Berkeley--is one of many signs that Yahoo! is rapidly building "the place" on the web for the education community.

As Yahoo! points out, the agreement with UC Berkeley, “expands scope of research in Search Technology and Social and Mobile Media; [and is a] first step in establishing closer ties with university campuses.”

Yahoo! + Social Media

• Yahoo! has donated hardware, hosting, bandwidth, as well as financial resources to support the expansion and ongoing development for the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.

• The April 2005 announcement that Adobe was going to acquire Macromedia puts Yahoo! in a prime spot to expand on their existing strategic partnership with Adobe. Macromedia already has a strong foothold in the education community and has invested a lot of time cultivating those relationships by attending education conferences, hosting online product seminars, teacher outreach , community forums, and support.

• FlickrEDU: While not originally developed as an education tool, Flickr, and other social networking technologies have the ability to play an important part in student motivation, retention and learning—especially in distributed learning environments.

Social software technologies and other Web 2.0 media are important tools because of their ability to foster interaction and communication between students.

• My Web 2.0 is a new Yahoo! Search product based on social networking, tags, folksonomies, and group collaboration. This new "social search" engine allows users to save their links and then share them with people they know and trust by placing them in a community knowledge pool dubbed, My Community.

• Y! Search provides a stripped down version of the Yahoo portal, providing students with a “distraction free” zone to conduct research, WebQuests, or other collaborative web-based projects.

• Yahoo! 360: One of the key benefits of Yahoo! 360, in terms of educational blogging, is that it provides the user with the ability to manage who can view their personal information based, in part, on user-defined criteria. I

In other words, the user controls who has access to any and all parts of the content on their blog. Now open for public beta, Yahoo! 360, features integration with several Yahoo! products including: FlickrMy Web 2.0 (via RSS Feeds).

• The Open Content Alliance is a collaborative effort of several organizations to build a permanent archive of text and multimedia content. The content archive will be available exclusively via Yahoo! Search.

 

• 9/06 Update: Yahoo! buys JumpCut.