Web 2.0: Salvation or Hype

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Web 2.0 Salvation or Hype?

• A summary of
• What is Web 2.0? Ideas, technologies and
  implications for education / Paul Anderson
• JISC Technology and Standards Watch, Feb 2007
• http//www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/techwatch/ts
  w0701b.pdf
• Roger Mills

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What is Web 2.0?

• Web 2.0 does it exist?
• Social web blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, podcasts
  etc
• According to Tim Berners-Lee, this is what the
  WWW was intended to be all along the ability
  for everyone to view and edit any web page

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Blogs

• Term coined 1997
• Blogosphere now incorporates multimedia
  photo-blogs, v(ideo) blogs, uploads from mobiles
  (mob-blogging)
• Facilitates syndication and linking but blog
  permalinks link pages not content may not stay
  same
• 13million blogs but 10million inactive

4
Wikis

• Have history and rollback functions to restore
  previous versions blogs do not
• Self-moderation v. malicious editing

5
Tagging

• Social bookmarking stored centrally and shared
• Tagged with (multiple) keywords
• Also used for photos (Flickr), video (YouTube),
  Odeo (podcasts audio blogs)
• CiteULike store, organise and share academic
  papers

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RSS

• Lists updates to websites, blogs or podcasts
• Collected and piped to users by syndication
• Several versions of RSS
• New syndication system developed - 2003 Atom
• Open standards

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Newer Web 2.0 services

• Social networking
• Aggregation services
• Data mash-ups
• Tracking and filtering content
• Collaborating
• Replicate office-style software in browser
• Source ideas or work from the crowd

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6 Key ideas

• Individual production and User Generated Content
• Harness the power of the crowd
• Data on an epic scale
• Architecture of Participation
• Network effects
• Openness

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1. User Generated Content

• Self-publishing growth similar to that engendered
  by laser printing and dtp
• Cheap, fairly high quality video equipment allows
  media to use users submissions eg news from
  citizen journalists
• Motives monetary at one end, reputation at the
  other
• End of editorial control eg structure and
  authority of edited newspaper

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2. Harnessing the power of the crowd

• Intelligence or information?
• Cloudmark collective spam filtering works
  better than machine analysis
• Crowdsourcing intermediary sites which make UGC
  available for re-use
• Threatens market for professionals

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Folksonomy

• A collection of tags for individual use not
  collaborative
• Allows links between individuals or sites with
  similar interests
• Repetition of tags indicate merging trends of
  interest

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3. Data on an epic scale

• Ever-increasing amounts of data leading to
  datafication
• Google, Amazon, E-Bay rely on massive amounts of
  data generated by ordinary browsing to provide
  targeted services through learning
• Who owns this data? Re-purposing, reformatting,
  re-using - sinister implications?

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4. Architecture of participation

• System utilises user interactions to improve
  itself
• Service improves the more people use it

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5. Network effects

• Service increases in value to existing users as
  others start using it
• Can result in lock-in to technology eg MS Office
• Or adoption of inferior technology eg VHS over
  Betamax
• Niche areas become significant

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6. Openness

• Power not in data itself but control of access to
  that data
• Aggregation and republishing obscure rights

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Pedagogical implications

• Techno-centric assumptions obscure motivation
• Not all learners find self-production compelling
• Students entrenched in peer and mentoring
  communities may challenge accepted ideas of
  hierarchy and production/authentication of
  knowledge
• Privacy and plagiarism
• Shared authorship and assessment

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Whither VLEs?

• Students prefer Facebook for discussion of
  lecture materials downloaded from VLEs
• Develop Personalised Learnimg Environments PLEs?

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Scholarly Research

• Use of folksonomies in developing formal
  ontologies
• Cannot replace indexing/KM efforts using
  controlled vocabularies
• Can develop alongside to develop collabularies
• Private blogging for peer debate
• Often anonymous
• Collective blogs for peer and public communication

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Scholarly publishing

• First stage publishing may become web-only
• Only best and most durable info published
  conventionally
• Data mashing requires open access to data
• Open peer review

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Libraries, repositories and archiving

• Library 2.0 services not necessarily product of
  Web 2.0 technologies
• Eg ILL comparable to Amazon delivery
• People who borrowed this also borrowed
• Ethos of he long tail everything has a value
  beyond how many times it is requested
• Taggingindexing, blog trackbackingcitation
  analysis, blog-rollingchaining, RSS alerting
• Web 2.0 can help understanding of user behaviour

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Archiving

• Part of cultural memory
• UK Web Archiving Consortium (UKWAC)
• Many legal problems
• Many technical problems
• Web is transient
• Depends on linked objects, in varying formats all
  of which must be migrated
• Graphical look and feel do we need it?

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Preserving Web 2.0 content

• Often held in databases, so part of hidden web
• Pages created dynamically little technology to
  preserve developed yet
• APIs proprietary and in perpetual beta
• Much data stored on servers owned by American
  companies
• Aggregated data as gathered e.g. by Google of
  great historical interest

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Web 2.0 archiving characteristics

• Link rot severe in blog archives
• Users consider media-sharing services archives
  already. But if company closes?
• Personal catalogues and collections who is
  responsible for archiving?
• Web 2.0 not conducive to traditional archiving
  approaches
• Can we devise new ones?

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Looking ahead

• Major IPR impact
• Information overload
• Anxiety if not fully connected
• Personal catalogues manifestations of persons
  persona
• A persons path through the information space
  defines their lives
• Who owns this information?
• New ways of human interaction?

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Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web

• Shift from documents to data on which machines
  act
• Not realised yet
• Ontologies (costly) v. folksonomies (free)
• Semantic wikis and blogs annotated by machine
• Trust, security and social networks

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Technology Bubble 2.0?

• Unwise to invest too much time, resources and
  data in new and untested applications
• Proceed with caution!

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And Web 3.0?

• High-powered graphics
• Visualisation
• 3-D social networking
• 3-D Internet merging web and virtual world
  environments
• Or a backlash to Web 2.0 software that erases
  your digital path

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Consequences of Web 2.0 for education

• Power of the crowd new communities and groups
• Growth in self-generated content challenges
  exiting hierarchies
• Profound intellectual property debates
• Watch this space!