Web 2.0 and meetings, meetings, meetings . . .

So today is one of THOSE days. You know what I mean, right? It's back to school time, and so we as faculty get to spend the day in meetings. So as I sit here listening to the same old things that we seem to go over every year (new faculty, policies and procedures, etc.) I'm wondering, isn't there some better use of our time? Right now I'm in my School meeting, and later I "get to go" to College of Education faculty meeting where we'll go over the same things.

I guess the good thing is I'm getting a free lunch from McAlister's Deli, and who can argue with their potato salad? At the COE faculty meeting, I'll get a new T-shirt, so here's to hoping I like it better than last year's which is now a sleep shirt for my kids.

But what does all of this have to do with Web 2.0?

Well, I wonder how we could use it to do this same thing? Now, I like the sandwiches, don't get me wrong, but I'm just sitting here wondering how we could use the technology to be more efficient. I'm not sure it would work, but this is just brainstorming, right? And besides, who reads this besides me anyway . . . and quite frankly, I'm not blogging for readers anyway.

So let's see:

• Blogs
  
  
  
  
  • I don't see how this would work. What, my school head is going to blog all this school info and then we'll all go read it? Nope. Now I guess he could keep an ongoing blog of dates and business that comes his way and we could all subscribe via RSS feed and then we'd know what was going on, but I can't see how that would replace or enhance what we'd do. Now if we did that (like I described above) it would give us the opportunity to come to the meeting much more informed, but who am I kidding? They send me the notes for approval before each meeting, but I've NEVER read them.
  
  
  
  


• Wikis
  
  
  
  • Again, I don't think it would make any difference to what I'm going through today, but a wiki could be used for something like the approval of the minutes. Again, I don't think that would make any difference, but you could dream.
  
  
  
  


• Social Bookmarking
  
  
  
  • NOPE. No application. It's cool and we use them in our program to share information between instructors, but they wouldn't help us with these meetings.
  
  
  
  


• Folksonomies
  
  
  
  • NOPE. Again, no application.
  
  
  
  


• Social Networking
  
  
  
  • Can you imagine faculty meetings on Facebook? That would be funny to try and watch everyone just figure out how to use it.
  
  
  
  


• Podcasting
  
  
  
  • This could be used, but there would be no interaction. But really, is there interaction in this meeting? Other than giving each other a hard time, not really. The question would then be who would listen to it? But who's listening in this meeting? As I look around, I'm blooging, three others are on their laptops, one guy is reading the paper. and everyone else is watching their watches. So a podcast could have just as much effect as being here, but again, minus the deli sandwiches and potato salad. Video podcasting falls into this same category.
  
  
  
  


• RSS Feeds
  
  
  
  • No application here, unless you were using the blogging example above. But who would?
  
  
  
  

So what does all this mean? Not much. It means that I'll continue to come to these meetings. Yuck. It means that we have all of this great technology, and yet it doesn't help me out as far as saving my time in this manner. What does it mean? It means I'll go to the COE faculty meeting when this one is over, collect my T-shirt, and check my Facebook . . .