Abstract:

Web 2.0 tools have acquired an increasingly relevant role in today's society, both at a professional and a personal level. Although people are not yet consciously aware of it, resorting to online tools has not only become a habit but a necessity. Despite the tendency for educators to start using ICT in the classroom, there is still a lot of skepticism and reluctance towards applying and using these tools on a regular basis.
This paper is a case-study based on a ten-hour workshop organized by two educators and researchers at a university in Portugal. The two lecturers have successfully applied electronic tools to their scientific research and work as online course facilitators. Confronted with the resistance and lack of motivation from their peers, they decided to create this workshop and apply it at another Portuguese Higher Education Institution.
Participants will be introduced to academic social networking for finding other researchers/literature, social bookmarking, for saving/sharing interesting links and webpages, wikis for writing the paper/collaborating with others, tools such as Voicethread© or Prezi© for conference presentation as well as tools for creating audio files, for saving and sharing files in the cloud and for scheduling meetings, for example. All the tools and links will be placed in a wiki especially created for the course, thus providing the hands-on experience of creating and using wikis and allowing participants to find complementary information on the materials and tools presented.
Finally, a survey will be made to assess the impact of the workshop within a specific academic reality. The overall objective of this study is not to assess how successfully learners will be in applying these tools in the future rather, how motivated they are to doing so.

Keywords:

ICT, research tools, wiki, learner motivation, collaboration.