Web 2.0 Technologies

You should check out three schools/programs that I think are doing some very interesting things with web 2.0 technologies: California Lutheran, Youngstown State and Wharton's MBA program.

At YSU we have take the web 2.0 marketing efforts into our own hands with some animated productions to start announcing our visit days, early deadlines and general information about the campus. There are pros (track the success or failure of them) and cons (time of production and maintaining you work load) to doing them.
We ( 2 person team) are looking at launching about 15 different productions by Dec. 31st. I would be willing to chat with you.

Web 2.0 has become such a broad term. I tend to break it down into social media/networking, user interface design, and web services/mashups.

On the social media front, we plan to launch a website this summer that will act as our own mini-YouTube. Every piece of video and audio we produce, as well as Soundslides and photos, will be housed in one place. We'll make it easy to share through email and social bookmarking, and use tagging to organize the content. No comments or user uploaded content for now, though....too risky until we have a firm policy.

For UI design, we try to take advantage of the new JavaScript libraries out there that make it easy to add interactivity to a Web page (Prototype, Scriptaculous, MooTools, jQuery, etc.) For example, in the online version of one of our printed magazines, we've added Lightbox photo galleries. This is the tip of the iceberg, hopefully we'll soon be using more, similar to what Apple has been doing on their site recently.

And for mashups, we integrate with Google Maps whenever possible. Our 50th anniversary is coming up, and for a history website we may use the Dipity timeline generator. A lot of other little widgets can be handy, too.

There's so little to do! And so much time! Wait....strike that....reverse it.