The most surprising thing I have learned is that even though I have worked in and around "Web 2.0" for the last three years of my career, it is WAY bigger than I had even imagined. There is an academic side of it that I never considered and much beyond the scope of this course. In my readings for the social media paper, I came across a fairly extensive amount of research from the learning theory direction, psychological direction, and social science perspective, including anthropological research! (The anthropological research was quite interesting, by the way.)
The most practical things I learned were the many different ways that these tools could be applied, in a scope far beyond any I had considered in my perspective as a K-8 classroom teacher. It was pretty humbling, but reconfirmed what I had espoused to my students: This is way too big and changing far too rapidly for any of us to become an expert on it - we all have to learn from each other.
I rely on usage of shared materials quite heavily in my profession as a teacher and have learned of several additional resources that will be of use to me in both fields. My production of learning resource has been limited to creation of educational technology instruction, including Microsoft Office applications.
I have had the opportunity to meet several interesting people in the class and have really enjoyed the varying perspectives presented. If it makes you think about alternate perspectives, it's a good thing! Sometimes we all have a tendency to get tunnel vision about a topic, based on our own paradigms, so all the variations have been great practice in seeing things from a potential client's perspective.
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