The Internet2 K20 Initiative recently launched a brand new social networking site called Muse which seeks to radically enhance collaboration, information-sharing, and technology opportunities between and amongst the Internet2-enabled higher education community and the 50,000 K-12 schools, community colleges, libraries, museums, zoos, and aquaria in the 38 states now connected to the Internet2 network. The site is also expected to provide a better bridge between the U.S. K-20 community and international counterparts worldwide. University of Washington staff and faculty looking to expand their network of collaborators around the use of advanced teaching and learning applications will find Muse to be a useful tool.

"The Internet2 K20 community has traditionally embraced advanced technology to facilitate new opportunities for students at all levels to experience a richer environment for teaching and learning. The development of a social networking web resource is a natural progression for our community which has long sought more efficient ways to share experiences, ideas, resources, projects and collaborations across educational sectors and geographic boundaries," said Louis Fox, Director, Internet2 K20 Initiative. "We have experienced strong use since the site has gone live and expect its adoption to continue especially as functionality enabling deeper collaboration is added. We see Muse as a potentially helpful resource to enhance project collaborations on a global scale and facilitate cross disciplinary engagement."

Muse was developed by University of Washington student web programmers under the direction of James Werle, Director of Special Projects within Learning and Scholarly Technologies. The site expands upon the core code of Drupal, an open source content management platform, and provides many of the Web 2.0 features found in Facebook and MySpace. Practitioners from the broad K-20 community can set up individual and institutional profiles, describe advance network-enabled projects and applications, share resources, and create direct connections with their peers regionally, nationally, and internationally. The site also allows online communities to be created and scoped to a specific geographic area. This feature is great for groups of organizations looking to share resources just within their immediate state networking region while still participating in the global Muse community. Since the launch, regional sites have been created for Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Minnesota, and North Carolina with others expected to join in the months to come.

Kathy Kraemer, TIES Education Technology Consultant, agrees that Muse is already greatly assisting their efforts regionally and expects that adoption will grow. "In Minnesota, there are many groups working on a variety of Internet2 applications. With Muse, we've become more aware of other schools and organizations working on similar projects and are finding better ways to work together," said Kraemer. "It does an amazing job of cross promoting organizations, projects, and people. Beyond our state, when interested people ask me where to go for more information on Internet2, I point them to Muse to find a whole array of people and organizations."

While the site continues to rapidly expand in use, Muse plans to introduce the ability for users create topically based communities, chat in real time about projects and i nterests, receive email "museletters" tailored to their specific interests, and provide RSS feeds to broadcast information on new users, projects, and organizations as the site grows. In doing so, the site intends to provide the community the ability to develop stronger, more comprehensive collaboration groups and exponentially promote the more rapid adoption of advanced networking teaching and learning applications among Internet2 users.

Visit http://k20.internet2.eduto create an account and test drive Muse.