Web 2.0 @ School

An excellent list of productivity tools for students and teachers in two parts: part 1 (tools for use in learning: organizers, grade books, etc) and part 2 (covering office applications: word processing, presentation, mapping, etc.). The user interface of some of these tools is exceptional. I wish we could create such interfaces to our corporate applications at this pace.

I worry about how we will keep our future employees happy with the relatively older tools we provide within the Enterprise. They are sure to bring these new tools with them to work and in the process create a big data security problem for IT. I still remember the management, deployment, integration and training challenges that Palm Pilots presented to IT when our customers brought their personal devices to work and wanted to copy work contacts and to-do lists on them. We overcame that by providing better tools (blackberry, etc.) of our own or by creating a list of "approved" tools that we learned to support within our environment. We must get ready to help our users seamlessly leverage the new tools in the workplace.

The rate of innovation and release of new products is very high. Keeping the IT staff trained and up to the task of helping our customers with the new technologies will be a huge challenge.