Pew Internet Life researchers Madden and Fox (2006) conclude wryly that “analysts, marketers and other stakeholders in the tech field” tend to “huddle the new generation of Internet applications and businesses” under the “conceptual umbrella” of Web 2.0 for reasons that have more to do with the individual ‘stake’ which each has in successfully promoting or exploiting some form of Internet business or service. As a result Web 2.0 is both a thing in the world to be observed and understood, and also a way of thinking which changes the very world we seek to analyse and control. Thus any project – such as the one I am now engaged in – which attempts to use Web 2.0 within a specific domain, such as education, is both an application of ideas to achieve certain outcomes within that domain and also part of the writing of the broader story of what the Internet might be.
A basic approach to Web 2.0
There are many ways and reasons to define Web 2.0 (a term which may well be starting to date). What I will try and do here is sketch one definition, which assigns to this label certain things people do with the Internet and the technologies they use, while hinting at the arbitrariness of doing just that and searching for something more than just a list of tools and techniques. In other words, this definition works, for this site and the underlying project. You can read more about my views on Web 2.0 in Web 2.0: an argument against convergence? (First Monday, March 2008) and Tim O’Reilly and Web 2.0: The economics of memetic liberty and control, (Communication, Politics and Culture, 42:2 (2009), pp. 6-23.)
This definition is also designed to highlight knowledge networking and web presence, which I believe are the main opportunities that Web 2.0 affords us and which thus challenge us as educators to rethink the Internet and education.
Web 2.0 can be understood to involve four broad tendencies.
- Web 2.0 involves technologies for website design and operation that create more interactive, immediate web-screen experiences and include increasingly extensive data-sharing ‘behind the screen’. An example would be the air travel booking sites – think Travelocity or Expedia that, in real time, collate and present both data about travel options and prices from several different sources including airline reservation systems and involve immediate transactions with linkages to other commercial endeavours. It is a more active, programmed (and programmable) web experience.
- Web 2.0 is about new economic approaches to information exchange, involving a combination of two elements: the business model requires unpaid (though not unrewarded) labour from users to generates web content; it also, and more importantly, depends on the fact that the behaviour of users at sites such as Facebook creates data which site owners then exploit for advertising profitability.
- Web 2.0 is about media consumers becoming producers: creating, distributing and interacting with content, without being dependent on one-way flows of media content designed for mass and perhaps passive consumption. Services such as Blogger, Wikipedia, Flickr, and YouTube demonstrate what and how Web 2.0 describes from this perspective.
- Web 2.0 is a state of mind, an abstraction which, though realised within some technologies, businesses, and activities, is actually concerned with democratisation, liberty and empowerment.
Put together, these tendencies provide the four sides of a conceptual frame to make sense of the specifics of Web 2.0
Source: Allen, M. 2009. Education and the Internet Web 2.0 & renewed innovation in online learning. Teaching and Learning Forum, Perth
Some Web 2.0 media…
A more social – business view:
A more technological view:
Alternative terms and ideas
Thinking about the names that can be applied to recent developments in networked, online culture helps us to grasp the nature of that change. It is essential to do this, because the Wrb is not like it was when learning management systems first appeared and when online learning first became widely available to students. Web 2.0 is used, but we might also consider the terms social media and the read/write web. What can we make of these three names?
Setting aside technology for a moment, Web 2.0 has a strongly economic foundation, a new business model after the dot.com crash, that seeks value from and through data (including humans as data), and data is a massively underexploited resource (for example, look at the way amazon seeks to generate profits). The read/write web evokes educational principles, where websites become interactive spaces between the user and the web itself, re-inscribing the web with active construction of knowledge (think of Wikipedia); social media is a term which both links the web to traditional media, and positions it as different: it is the end of convergence (all media becomes one) and the start of greater differentiation, distribution and many alternative scheduling, commenting and creative practices.
These three terms invoke different kinds of human –computer relationships. Web 2.0, with its extensive interacting web services, linked through APIs, fast code, data-collecting algorithms, implies that humans now work for a website, labouring to make it better and more profitable. The read/write web is about changing knowledge, fluidity and the way a website calls to a user for change, but humans must enact that change. (technology and humanity in equal partnership). Social media claims implicitly that technology disappears or is disguised: there are new social processes where human relations form and are sustained through the sharing of media.
(This approach underpins my analysis of authentic learning and social media, presented in 2010 in the UK:)
In all cases, however, three key things stand out. Communication and information processes, the heart of social interaction as well as knowledge work, are more:
- public
- distributed / fragmented
- fluid in the positioning of people as authors and readers
Conclusion
Web 2.0 is many things, to many people. It may already have ‘ended’ as a particular label – being replaced by some with the term Web 3.0, though this persistence of versions is problematic, or more generally by the phrase “social media”. At some level, it doesn’t matter, for the social effects, technologies, and political directions which are labelled as Web 2.0 persist and, indeed, increase. All that is important for knowledge networking as a paradigm for learning, and for using this site, is to recognise that Web 2.0 means:
- Technologies that enable lightweight, web-based applications that serve to support collaborative, distributed and effective knowledge work, largely in a public environment and with strong interconnecting possibilities
- A social orientation towards people as co-authors, managers and discussants of information, creating, sharing and circulating ideas and their perspectives on them rather than being fixed nodes in a sender-receiver model of communication.
Further Reading
One of the best educationally oriented reports on Web 2.0 is Anderson, P. (2007). What is Web 2.0? Ideas, technologies and implications for education.
See also McLoughlin and Lee (2007). Social Software and Participatory Choices as one of many valuable articles.
