The annual WCET 2006 conference took place in Portland last week and it focused on technologies in learning with presentations and sessions on social software and e-portfolios. The slides by Chris Lott on "Making sense of social software" are available online. I will integrate some of the  graphics in this post because I think they neatly summarize  social software and how it is seen nowadays. The first image shows how people participate in web2.0 applications and how they exchange information by using them. It also shows the underlying technologies and in my opinion provides a quite comprehensive explanation of web2.0:

web2.o participation information model

source: Dion Hinchcliffe (unfortunately, I cannot find the exact post, since I got the image via Chris Lott’s presentation)

The next image is by Chris Lott herself and shows the connections between wikis, blogs, and discussion forums:

connection wikis blogs discussion forums 

source: WCET presentation by Chris Lott 

And last but not least, here’s the enhancement of the image by other web2.0 technologies like photo sharing, social bookmarking, and media casting:

enhancement web2.0 

source: Chris Lottman 

I still have to ponder these models for a while, but I wanted to let you know right away…