A New Thread: Web 2.0 – A Promise Kept?

Educators have been promoting the value of integrating technology into the curriculum for decades – at least as far back as the roll-out of the Apple II computer (and perhaps earlier). I look to you and John McMullen for clarity here on the time frame. I know I started teaching with technology in 1980 at New York University.

We have come a very long way in this time. I still vividly remember Prasad, my graduate assistant and normally a very low key kind of guy, come leaping into my office at Marist College, where I was Acting Director of Academic Computing, in 1990, to pronounce that Marist had an operational web server for faculty and students. All the content we put up on it could be viewed through a web browser, Mosaic, from anywhere in the world, from any computer attached to the Internet! At the birth of Marist Country, the name we gave our server, there were less than 1,000 web servers in the entire world.

Over these years organizations have spent hours and hours creating content for their web servers. There are multi-dozens of job titles for web content creation and maintenance. We are all used to how it works. The Web Master rules!

Now we have a whole new phenomenon – it is called Web 2.0. In a nutshell, Web 2.0 is the dream of a lifetime, it is the promise of the user-built, user-centered, user-run Internet. As the web started to return to its social roots with the familiar blogs and wikis, the creative minds started to take those leaps that always seem to get us into trouble eventually. Social media took a giant step when it became viral. Facebook and MySpace encouraged a whole new generation of marketing geniuses and the concept of viral marketing took off. After all, there must be money to be made here, or is there?

Many unconventional ideas are associated with Web 2.0 and Web 2.0 applications, adding hesitancy to adoption by some organizations that have traveled the whole gamut from total freedom and democracy to a prison like locked down dictatorship. When I first started using the Internet and someone brought up privacy, I knew immediately that using it meant losing my privacy forever. I have accepted this fact all these years. I have no secrets from anyone.

In O’Reilly’s “What is Web 2.0” we are told Web 2.0 is “an attitude, not a technology.” Web 2.0 applications are always in beta. The software gets better as more people use it. It is “hackable.” Trust your users. (www.oreillynet.com/lpt/a/6228). Try telling your local church or your company or almost any group today that has dealt with web site security, that you are going to set up a fancy multimedia web site that is going to attract people to it like nothing else has, and that has these characteristics.

As of today I can think of the following important Web 2.0 applications: LinkedIn (the most important after Facebook and MySpace), Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, de.licio.us, Digg, Ning (my favorite), KickApps, StumbleUpon, FarkIt!, blogs, wikis, and your favorite one.

You can stay up on all the Web 2.0 applications and tools by reading the Internet magazine, Web 2.0 The Magazine. Weekly updates are also available (web2themag.com).

Of course, I cannot end this thought without a mention of 3DVR, a topic I will expand upon in subsequent postings. Second Life is probably the most important of these right now and one I am particularly interested in.

I hope you join this discussion early. In this post I talk about how we got to Web 2.0 and what some of its basic characteristics are. I encourage more in this vein in response to this post. Please hold off on 3DVR and how we are going to use all this in education for subsequent posts or start a new post on the subject of your choosing and I will chime in.

Also, what is your favorite Web 2.0 application? Which ones did I miss?

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