Keith Hamon's List: Web 2.0

• To make hypertext interesting, it must be broadly connected – beyond a document, beyond a hard drive.  Either everything is connected, or everything is useless.

  • A nice tie-back to connectivity and connectivism. Any collection of isolated facts is useless as knowledge. Only when facts are connected to people and issues do they become knowledge.

• Services like Facebook, Twitter and Flickr are oceans of personal minutiae — birthday greetings sent and received, school and work gossip, photos of family vacations, and movies watched.

• Lowering communication costs doesn’t just lead to more communication, it leads to qualitatively different behavior by web users.
• Lowering the interaction costs of communication leads to perhaps the most important feature of Web 2.0: its inclusive, collaborative capacity. The new Read/Write web is allowing people to work together, share information, and reach new and potentially enormous audiences outside some of the traditional structures of power, authority, and communication in our society. The social developments that have resulted from the Web 2.0 phenomena are best understood through a lens of democratization, but we must keep in mind the caveat that democracy means many different things in many different places (Haste and Hogan, 2006).
• Web logs, or blogs
• Wikis, websites which are authored by a community of people
• Podcasting tools allowed for the uploading and syndication of audio files, and podcasts
• YouTube pioneered online video sharing
• Online social networks also fall within the domain of Web 2.0
• Virtual worlds, including online games, are, to some degree, other forms of online social networks
• In America in 2006, over 50% of teenagers – across racial and socioeconomic lines – have created pages on online social networks like Facebook and MySpace, and in all likelihood this percentage has increased in the last two years (Lenhart, Madden, Macgill, and Smith, 2007).
• Web 2.0 refers to these simple, often free tools for adding content to the Web, but it also refers to systems that allow users to evaluate content. Tagging refers to the process of allowing users to apply key word labels to discrete bits of content.
• convergence is one of the most common features in the evolution of Web 2.0 tools.
• Whether or not the democratic possibilities of Web 2.0 are realized depends a great deal upon the degree to which users can negotiate for freedom and autonomy within the networks created and controlled by established political and corporate interests.
• The driving force behind Web 2.0, the desire to lower the costs of communication, will continue to be a force shaping the web in the decades ahead, and innovations in time-cheap communications are going to present a future full of new surprises. Three other trends at various levels will continue to act on and shape this driving force. First, new platforms will continue to emerge. Second, the functionality in platforms will continue to converge. Third, we should expect to see greater integration between Web 2.0 tools and handheld devices. Finally, we should consider the efforts to those who seek not to extend the Web 2.0 regime, but to transcend it.
• No facet of modern life will remain untransformed by the innovations of the Web 2.0.
• Online networks may also upset hierarchical corporate structures.
• These new platforms may allow different kinds of talents – talents related to online networking, communication and collaboration – to be more highly valued in the work place. They also may allow for employees at the bottom of the corporate hierarchy to more easily bend the ear of those at the top, and the examples of both Linux development and the Toyota production system lend support to this hypothesis (Evans and Wolf, 2005). These flatter, more democratic, more meritocratic social organizations may allow firms to draw out the strengths of their employees with less regard towards their position in the organization.
• The fans were not the simple recipients of the movie; instead, they helped to design the film.
• If myBO becomes another media for the Obama administration to spread a centrally constructed message, then it becomes another instrument of elite political power. If, however, myBO morphs into my.americangovernment.gov, a space where citizens have the opportunity to contribute and collaborate on solving problems and speaking truth to power, then the democratizing power of Web 2.0 tools may indeed lead to a more democratic republic.
• Relationships developed in virtual or online worlds are not pale reflections of “real” world phenomena. They are a new class of meaningful and profound interactions which researchers will have to consider seriously as they try to understand the evolving nature of society in a Web 2.0 world.
• hypothesized benefits for using Web 2.0 tools in the classroom with students, which can be organized into four major categories. The first category involves increasing engagement.
• Web 2.0 tools provide new avenues to teach fundamental skills, like writing, communication, collaboration, and new media literacy.
• In addition to developing both old and new fundamental skills, students also need to rehearse for 21^st century situations.
• emerging Web tools can enlighten the critique of the contemporary state of education.
• The Flat Classroom Project of 2007
• While no studies have looked widely across Web 2.0 tools, there is anecdotal evidence that this kind of project is a very rare exception to two normal states. The first normal state with Web 2.0 is failure. Of the hundreds of thousands of blogs and wikis created, most die on the vine. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as one of the advantages of Web 2.0 is that they are both inexpensive and time-cheap to create, and so one can fail repeatedly before finding a model that works. That said, these failed instantiations are not realizing any of the aforementioned hypothesized benefits. The second normal state for Web 2.0 tools are applications that fit neatly into standard, industrial models of education. In these states, a wiki might be used as an easy way for a teacher to create a website as a one-way delivery device for content, rather than a collaborative medium. Or perhaps a student creates a blog as a kind of online portfolio, but her writings are never published widely, never shared with others, or never commented upon by classmates. In a sense the blog has allowed the student to pass in her homework online, but none of the potentially benefits of publishing within a larger critical, collaborative community are realized. If these two states are indeed the norm, then right now Web 2.0 tools may offer tremendous potential for education, but this potential is not much realized.
• There is also anecdotal evidence that the distribution of the use of these tools, sophisticated or not, is skewed towards wealthy, suburban communities rather than poorer rural or urban communities.
• very few systems have incentives that reward teachers for innovative instruction.
• Most teachers learn to teach from their own experience and from mentors, neither of which usually provide an exemplary model for technology use in the classroom.
• The driving technical principle behind the evolution of Web 2.0 tools is the reduction of the interaction costs of communication, and these costs will continue to be driven down. As these costs are driven down, we will continue to see the emergence of qualitatively new behaviors and the products of these behaviors will be as or more bizarre to future peoples as Wikipedia and Twitter are to us now. These new behaviors will be at some level democratizing, as they will involve harnessing collaborative energy and collective intelligence to meet cooperative goals. Many of these innovations will level hierarchies and include and involve more people in social systems. They will accelerate globalization by making cross-cultural, cross-content, cross-time-zone conversations even cheaper and take less time to achieve.

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• privacy in an era of social media is complicated. It’s not simply about individual data.  It's about managing visibility, negotiating networks, and facing an ever-increasing flow of information.
• Privacy is fundamentally about both context and networks.

  • Very much an issue of complexity: how to negotiate the personal and the environmental, how to preserve the integrity of the self while at the same time exchanging real value with the environment. It's all about how to be a part of without being subsumed by the Whole.
• People may not like having their privacy violated or being in situations where they're being surveilled, but they will always choose social status and community over privacy.  They would rather be vulnerable to more people and deal with institutions than to feel disconnected from their peers and loved ones.

  • The drive to connect and collaborate with ones network is overwhelming.
• Participation in Facebook is not as much of an individual choice as people think.  Even if you opt out, people can still write about you, can still create groups about you, can still reference you in updates.  You become part of the network regardless of your personal choices.

  • Curious. One is on FB regardless. What are the implications here?

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