Writingmatrix: Connecting Students with Blogs, Tags, and Social Networking

This paper describes an extensive online project, Writingmatrix [http://writingmatrix.wikispaces.com], involving several key elements essential to collaboration in Web 2.0, such as aggregation, tagging, and social networking. Participant teachers in several different countries--Argentina, Venezuela, and Slovenia--had their adult students at various levels of English competency interact using blogs and other Web tools, including RSS feed readers and Technorati [http://technorati.com]. The teachers describe their respective settings, how they got their students started in communicating through blogging and social networking, and how in future they intend to expand the Writingmatrix experience.