Group items tagged

It is true that blogs are Web pages, but their reverse-chronological structure implies a different rhetorical purpose than a Web page, which has no inherent timeliness. That altered rhetoric helped shape a different audience, the blogging public, with its emergent social practices of blogrolling, extensive hyperlinking, and discussion threads attached not to pages but to content chunks within them. Reading and searching this world is significantly different from searching the entire Web world. Still, social software does not indicate a sharp break with the old but, rather, the gradual emergence of a new type of practice.

Rather than following the notion of the Web as book, they are predicated on microcontent. Blogs are about posts, not pages. Wikis are streams of conversation, revision, amendment, and truncation. Podcasts are shuttled between Web sites, RSS feeds, and diverse players. These content blocks can be saved, summarized, addressed, copied, quoted, and built into new projects. Browsers respond to this boom in microcontent with bookmarklets in toolbars, letting users fling something from one page into a Web service that yields up another page. AJAX-style pages feed content bits into pages without reloading them, like the frames of old but without such blatant seams. They combine the widely used, open XML standard with Java functions.3 Google Maps is a popular example of this, smoothly drawing directional information and satellite imagery down into a browser.

Web 2.0 builds on this original microcontent drive, with users developing Web content, often collaboratively and often open to the world.

openness remains a hallmark of this emergent movement, both ideologically and technologically.

Drawing on the “wisdom of crowds” argument, Web 2.0 services respond more deeply to users than Web 1.0 services. A leading form of this is a controversial new form of metadata, the folksonomy.

Third, people tend to tag socially. That is, they learn from other taggers and respond to other, published groups of tags, or “tagsets.”

First, users actually use tags.

Social bookmarking is one of the signature Web 2.0 categories, one that did not exist a few years ago and that is now represented by dozens of projects.

This is classic social software—and a rare case of people connecting through shared metadata.

RawSugar (http://www.rawsugar.com/) and several others expand user personalization. They can present a user’s picture, some background about the person, a feed of their interests, and so on, creating a broader base for bookmark publishing and sharing. This may extend the appeal of the practice to those who find the focus of del.icio.us too narrow. In this way too, a Web 2.0 project learns from others—here, blogs and social networking tools.

How can social bookmarking play a role in higher education? Pedagogical applications stem from their affordance of collaborative information discovery.

First, they act as an “outboard memory,” a location to store links that might be lost to time, scattered across different browser bookmark settings, or distributed in e-mails, printouts, and Web links. Second, finding people with related interests can magnify one’s work by learning from others or by leading to new collaborations. Third, the practice of user-created tagging can offer new perspectives on one’s research, as clusters of tags reveal patterns (or absences) not immediately visible by examining one of several URLs. Fourth, the ability to create multi-authored bookmark pages can be useful for team projects, as each member can upload resources discovered, no matter their location or timing. Tagging can then surface individual perspectives within the collective. Fifth, following a bookmark site gives insights into the owner’s (or owners’) research, which could play well in a classroom setting as an instructor tracks students’ progress. Students, in turn, can learn from their professor’s discoveries.

After e-mail lists, discussion forums, groupware, documents edited and exchanged between individuals, and blogs, perhaps the writing application most thoroughly grounded in social interaction is the wiki. Wiki pages allow users to quickly edit their content from within the browser window.11 They originally hit the Web in the late 1990s (another sign that Web 2.0 is emergent and historical, not a brand-new thing)

How do social writing platforms intersect with the world of higher education? They appear to be logistically useful tools for a variety of campus needs, from student group learning to faculty department work to staff collaborations. Pedagogically, one can imagine writing exercises based on these tools, building on the established body of collaborative composition practice. These services offer an alternative platform for peer editing, supporting the now-traditional elements of computer-mediated writing—asynchronous writing, groupwork for distributed members

Blogging has become, in many ways, the signature item of social software, being a form of digital writing that has grown rapidly into an influential force in many venues, both on- and off-line. One reason for the popularity of blogs is the way they embody the read/write Web notion. Readers can push back on a blog post by commenting on it. These comments are then addressable, forming new microcontent. Web services have grown up around blog comments, most recently in the form of aggregation tools, such as coComment (http://www.cocomment.com/). CoComment lets users keep track of their comments across myriad sites, via a tiny bookmarklet and a single Web page.

Technorati (http://technorati.com/) and IceRocket (http://icerocket.com/) head in the opposite direction of these sites, searching for who (usually a blogger) has recently linked to a specific item or site. Technorati is perhaps the most famous blog-search tool. Among other functions, it has emphasized tagging as part of search and discovery, recommending (and rewarding) users who add tags to their blog posts. Bloggers can register their site for free with Technorati; their posts will then be searchable by content and supplemental tags.

Many of these services allow users to save their searches as RSS feeds to be returned to and examined in an RSS reader, such as Bloglines (http://www.bloglines.com/) or NetNewsWire (http://ranchero.com/netnewswire/). This subtle ability is neatly recursive in Web 2.0 terms, since it lets users create microcontent (RSS search terms) about microcontent (blog posts). Being merely text strings, such search feeds are shareable in all sorts of ways, so one can imagine collaborative research projects based on growing swarms of these feeds—social bookmarking plus social search.

Students can search the blogosphere for political commentary, current cultural items, public developments in science, business news, and so on.

The ability to save and share a search, and in the case of PubSub, to literally search the future, lets students and faculty follow a search over time, perhaps across a span of weeks in a semester. As the live content changes, tools like Waypath’s topic stream, BlogPulse’s trend visualizations, or DayPop’s word generator let a student analyze how a story, topic, idea, or discussion changes over time. Furthermore, the social nature of these tools means that collaboration between classes, departments, campuses, or regions is easily supported. One could imagine faculty and students across the United States following, for example, the career of an Islamic feminist or the outcome of a genomic patent and discussing the issue through these and other Web 2.0 tools. Such a collaboration could, in turn, be discovered, followed, and perhaps joined by students and faculty around the world. Extending the image, one can imagine such a social research object becoming a learning object or an alternative to courseware.

A glance at Blogdex offers a rough snapshot of what the blogosphere is tending to pay attention to.

A closer look at an individual Blogdex result reveals the blogs that link to a story. As we saw with del.icio.us, this publication of interest allows the user to follow up on commentary, to see why those links are there, and to learn about those doing the linking. Once again, this is a service that connects people through shared interest in information.

The rich search possibilities opened up by these tools can further enhance the pedagogy of current events. A political science class could explore different views of a news story through traditional media using Google News, then from the world of blogs via Memeorandum. A history class could use Blogdex in an exercise in thinking about worldviews. There are also possibilities for a campus information environment. What would a student newspaper look like, for example, with a section based on the Digg approach or the OhmyNews structure? Thematizing these tools as objects for academic scrutiny, the operation and success of such projects is worthy of study in numerous disciplines, from communication to media studies, sociology to computer science.

At the same time, many services are hosted externally to academia. They are the creations of enthusiasts or business enterprises and do not necessarily embrace the culture of higher education.

Lawrence Lessig, J. D. Lasica, and others remind us that as tools get easier to use and practices become more widespread, it also becomes easier for average citizens to commit copyright violations.19

Web 2.0’s lowered barrier to entry may influence a variety of cultural forms with powerful implications for education, from storytelling to classroom teaching to individual learning. It is much simpler to set up a del.icio.us tag for a topic one wants to pursue or to spin off a blog or blog departmental topic than it is to physically meet co-learners and experts in a classroom or even to track down a professor. Starting a wiki-level text entry is far easier than beginning an article or book.

How can higher education respond, when it offers a complex, contradictory mix of openness and restriction, public engagement and cloistering?

most of the technologies that currently permeate Africa aren't terrestrial. There are very few telephone lines, but mobile penetration is higher than any other region in the world.

Instead, internet connectivity is distributed nearly entirely by satellite.

The developers who are coming up with solutions in the continent, the ones who are writing software or hacking hardware, are creating for some of the harshest environments and use-cases in the world. If it works in Africa, it will work anywhere."

Perhaps this thought is what motivated Google to invest in O3B Networks earlier this month. O3B Networks is an ambitious attempt to bring three billion people in the developing world (mainly in parts of Asia and Africa) online by launching sixteen inexpensive, low-orbit satellites. The potential benefits for Google are obvious. This is three billion new internet users, who will more than likely use Google to search, and who will potentially click-through Adsense links and use other Google products. An indicator that Google may be anticipating as much is their move into Africa last year. They've since opened offices and hired people in both South Africa and Kenya with plans to eventually operate out of all sub-Saharan African countries.

At the end of 2007 there were over 280 million mobile phone subscribers in Africa, representing a penetration rate of 30.4% Africa has become the fastest growing mobile market in the world with mobile penetration in the region ranging from 30% to 100% from country to country. Fastest growing markets are in Nigeria, South Africa and Egypt

The Democratic Republic of Congo, population 60 million, has 10,000 fixed telephones but more than a million mobile phone subscribers. In Chad, the fifth-least developed country, mobile phone usage jumped from 10,000 to 200,000 in three years.

Micro-payments and Mobile Banking

Mobile News Reporting

Do we foster an environment of “learned helplessness” among the faculty we support by most of our work being workshops on the tools rather than the craft?

And along these lines, I was part of some technology conversations with UBC faculty and I just relished watching my colleague Brian’s face contort when someone says, “how do I use twitter in my class?” He’d say in his sweet flip matter, “I am not going to answer that” — not because he doesn’t want to help, but because he wants to teach fishing, not toss them nuggets. You don’t find a freaking “job aid” that gives you a 8 step recipe to use twitter in your economics class– you spend some time in the environment, and let the affordances linger with your content area, and then maybe, you develop an idea that makes sense.

My thought is you do a lot of small things.

Toss ‘em something that might help on a personal level- be it flickr or doodle or diigo or heck, Blabberize.

it means less formal training, less workshops, and more learning by doing. It means using these tools a much as possible in our processes, so they become part of a fabric, not something strange and exotic.

They get so hung up on the basic that they can’t get into the cool stuff like expanding and applying their knowledge to more challenging problems. The same situation occurs with faculty. There are lots of folks out there…really…who don’t understand the Internet or servers or how web pages or email works or what the difference. For many folks, uploading links and icons and documents to Blackboard is a major accomplishment given their complete and total lack of understanding of the technological world. I am not even talking about understanding at the level of a techie but more an intuitive sense of how and why things work the way they do with technology.

“We suddenly have enough bandwidth, memory and computing power around these net-centric platforms,” he says. This means that the “people-to-people” concept that Web 1.0 wanted to accomplish can be supported, but with software interfaces that make it easier to contribute.

Seely Brown’s project-by-project approach is well-advised. “Start by putting together a decent collection of RSS feeds relevant to your project,” says Bryant. Then, enabling the posting and sharing of bookmarks will help glean knowledge from the project team. Complementing this with blogs will enable people to spend more time on those elements from the bookmarks and feeds that are particularly relevant and need further articulation.

Understanding the difference between consuming newsfeeds and consuming e-mail demonstrates a wider cultural shift that needs to take place in Web 2.0-savvy organisations. Generally, e-mails demand focused attention. They are processed in sequence and each takes a couple of minutes (or more) from your day. Handling newsfeeds and blog posts in that way would make you unproductive, says Bryant. They require a “river of news” approach, in which workers skim large amounts of information for helpful nuggets. Social tagging helps to naturally elevate certain topics above others by making them more popular.Finally, a wiki will help escalate blog discussion to more collaborative working, as needed. This has certainly been Ward’s experience: “The way the sites tend to work is that the blog is where people have a dialogue, but if it moves into more detailed work, it moves into the wiki,” she says.