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A few years ago, Scott Leslie published his matrix of some uses of blogs in education, which provides a very useful analysis of potential applications for teachers and learners.

For my professional development workshops, I wanted something similar but which was focused solely on learning applications. In addition, I wanted to reflect some of the additional options that learning management systems such as Moodle and Blackboard provide. In particular, wikis and blogs within an LMS tend to provide greater granularity and control of who can access learner-created documents.

To reflect these needs, I’ve developed the read-write matrix of web 2.0 tools for learning which maps various uses of blogs and wikis onto a similar two-dimensional matrix to Leslie’s. The matrix is intended to apply also to other Web 2.0 tools for writing, such as Google Docs.

The purpose of the read-write matrix

I’m hoping the matrix will be helpful to teachers in planning the educational use of Web 2.0 tools. Careful planning is needed because:

• While blogs and wikis within learning management systems typically are less sophisticated functionally than stand-alone software tools, they provide more complex options for controlling who reads and who writes.
• For varying combinations of read and write access, there are both risks and opportunities for learners and effective learning. It’s important to consider these and how they will be best managed.

Presentation: the read-write matrix

The presentation should be reasonably self-explanatory, or you may prefer to read about the matrix first.