While used widely and not all that accurately as an anologous description of the workings of digital information systems, the term ecology is still a powerful one to apply to better understand Web 2.0.
Two key things need to be said:
- The Web 2.0 applications which I descibe in this site (and many more beyond of course) create the potential for ecological systems of digital information and human actors because they so insistently and regularly ‘interlink’ and feed off one another: Slideshare presentations can be embedded in blogs; the output of mindmap tools (like Mind42) can appear within other websites, at the same time as its originating site; twitter streams can be read and imported into chat rooms (as with Todaysmeet); sharing of online content is part and parcel of its use, as at the bottom of this page; and the conversations options (the ubiquitous commenting, and often other communications) flow between dedicated tools and the content applications which create the focus for those conversations.
- Ecologies are about function and interaction, not taxonomy: thus, it is impossible to say there is this or that kind of application or tool within Web 2.0. Rather, many different sites and services afford a complex array of possible uses and outcomes, changing depending on the purpose with which they are used and the social affordances towhich they are allied by circumstance (or, in the case of education, by design).
Ultimately, many of the applications or tools which are most positively presented on this website are here because they best model ecological behaviour: they deliberately attempt to work with, through and in, other applications.
My take on the ‘ecological’ nature of Web 2.0 technologies is best shown via the following short poster from the 2010 Networked Learning Conference:
Information also forms an ecology in a Web 2.0, knowledge networked world, where the explicit and consistent interaction of discrete pieces of information (variously nodes, components, actors, vectors, symbiotes and more) creates a system, an ecology, that cannot be disaggregated into those component parts, even as we identify them. Within such a world, the public sharing of more and more knowledge fragments and information objects has led to the emergence of the ‘creative commons’, both as an idea and as a system of copyright reform / enactment. In this commons, the emphasis is always on re-use and re-interpretation, with limitations to that, rather than on the excessive protection of information with grudging permissions to use.
A useful explanation of creative commons is provided below (and the very fact I am embedding this video into the website here is an example of that ecological formation at work):
