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?

hat, exactly, constitutes a valid, original work? What are the implications for how we assess and reward creativity? Can a college or university tap the same sources of innovative talent and energy as Google or Flickr? What are the risks of permitting or opening up to this activity?

Remix is the reworking or adaptation of an existing work. The remix may be subtle, or it may completely redefine how the work comes across. It may add elements from other works, but generally efforts are focused on creating an alternate version of the original. A mashup, on the other hand, involves the combination of two or more works that may be very different from one another. In this article, I will apply these terms both to content remixes and mashups, which originated as a music form but now could describe the mixing of any number of digital media sources, and to data mashups, which combine the data and functionalities of two or more Web applications.

Harper's article "The Ecstasy of Influence," the novelist Jonathan Lethem imaginatively reviews the history of appropriation and recasts it as essential to the act of creation.3

Lethem's article is a must-read for anyone with an interest in the history of ideas, creativity, and intellectual property. It brilliantly synthesizes multiple disciplines and perspectives into a wonderfully readable and compelling argument. It is also, as the subtitle of his article acknowledges, "a plagiarism." Virtually every passage is a direct lift from another source, as the author explains in his "Key," which gives the source for every line he "stole, warped, and cobbled together." (He also revised "nearly every sentence" at least slightly.) Lethem's ideas noted in the paragraph above were appropriated from Siva Vaidhyanathan, Craig Baldwin, Richard Posner, and George L. Dillon.

Reading Walter Benjamin's highly influential 1936 essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,"4 it's clear that the profound effects of reproductive technology were obvious at that time. As Gould argued in 1964 (influenced by theorists such as Marshall McLuhan5), changes in how art is produced, distributed, and consumed in the electronic age have deep effects on the character of the art itself.

Yet the technology developments of the past century have clearly corresponded with a new attitude toward the "aura" associated with a work of invention and with more aggressive attitudes toward appropriation. It's no mere coincidence that the rise of modernist genres using collage techniques and more fragmented structures accompanied the emergence of photography and audio recording.

Educational technologists may wonder if "remix" or "content mashup" are just hipper-sounding versions of the learning objects vision that has absorbed so much energy from so many talented people—with mostly disappointing results.

The question is, why should a culture of remix take hold when the learning object economy never did?

when most learning object repositories were floundering, resource-sharing services such as del.icio.us and Flickr were enjoying phenomenal growth, with their user communities eagerly contributing heaps of useful metadata via simple folksonomy-oriented tagging systems.

the standards/practices relationship implicit in the learning objects model has been reversed. With only the noblest of intentions, proponents of learning objects (and I was one of them) went at the problem of promoting reuse by establishing an arduous and complex set of interoperability standards and then working to persuade others to adopt those standards. Educators were asked to take on complex and ill-defined tasks in exchange for an uncertain payoff. Not surprisingly, almost all of them passed.

Discoverable Resources

Educators might justifiably argue that their materials are more authoritative, reliable, and instructionally sound than those found on the wider Web, but those materials are effectively rendered invisible and inaccessible if they are locked inside course management systems.

It's a dirty but open secret that many courses in private environments use copyrighted third-party materials in a way that pushes the limits of fair use—third-party IP is a big reason why many courses cannot easily be made open.

The potential payoff for using open and discoverable resources, open and transparent licensing, and open and remixable formats is huge: more reuse means that more dynamic content is being produced more economically, even if the reuse happens only within an organization. And when remixing happens in a social context on the open web, people learn from each other's process.

Part of making a resource reusable involves making the right choices for file formats.

To facilitate the remixing of materials, educators may want to consider making the source files that were used to create a piece of multimedia available along with the finished result.

In addition to choosing the right file format and perhaps offering the original sources, another issue to consider when publishing content online is the critical question: "Is there an RSS feed available?" If so, conversion tools such as Feed2JS (http://www.feed2JS.org) allow for the republication of RSS-ified content in any HTML Web environment, including a course management system, simply by copying and pasting a few lines of JavaScript code. When an original source syndicated with RSS is updated, that update is automatically rendered anywhere it has been republished.

Jack Schofield

Guardian Unlimited

"An API provides an interface and a set of rules that make it much easier to extract data from a website. It's a bit like a record company releasing the vocals, guitars and drums as separate tracks, so you would not have to use digital processing to extract the parts you wanted."1

What's new about mashed-up application development? In a sense, the factors that have promoted this approach are the same ones that have changed so much else about Web culture in recent years. Essential hardware and software has gotten more powerful and for the most part cheaper, while access to high-speed connectivity and the enhanced quality of online applications like Google Docs have improved to the point that Tim O'Reilly and others can talk of "the emergent Internet operating system."15 The growth of user-centered technologies such as blogs have fostered a DIY ("do it yourself") culture that increasingly sees online interaction as something that can be personalized and adapted on the individual level. As described earlier, light syndication and service models such as RSS have made it easier and faster than ever to create simple integrations of diverse media types. David Berlind, executive editor of ZDNet, explains: "With mashups, fewer technical skills are needed to become a developer than ever. Not only that, the simplest ones can be done in 10 or 15 minutes. Before, you had to be a pretty decent code jockey with languages like C++ or Visual Basic to turn your creativity into innovation. With mashups, much the same way blogging systems put Web publishing into the hands of millions of ordinary non-technical people, the barrier to developing applications and turning creativity into innovation is so low that there's a vacuum into which an entire new class of developers will be sucked."16

The ability to "clone" other users' mashups is especially exciting: a newcomer does not need to spend time learning how to structure the data flows but can simply copy an existing framework that looks useful and then make minor modifications to customize the result.19

As with content remixing, open access to materials is not just a matter of some charitable impulse to share knowledge with the world; it is a core requirement for participating in some of the most exciting and innovative activity on the Web.

"My Maps" functionality

For those still wondering what the value proposition is for offering an open API, Google's development process offers a compelling example of the potential rewards.

Elsewhere, it is difficult to point to significant activity suggesting that the mashup ethos is taking hold in academia the way it is on the wider Web.

Yet for the most part, the notion of the data mashup and the required openness is not even a consideration in discussions of technology strategy in higher educational institutions. "Data integration" across campus systems is something that is handled by highly skilled professionals at highly skilled prices.

Revealing how a more adventurous and inclusive online development strategy might look on campus, Raymond Yee recently posted a comprehensive proposal for his university (UC Berkeley), in which he outlined a "technology platform" not unlike the one employed by Amazon.com (http://aws.amazon.com/)—resources and access that would be invaluable for the institution's programmers as well as for outside interests to build complementary services.

All too often, college and university administrators react to this type of innovation with suspicion and outright hostility rather than cooperation.

those of us in higher education who observe the successful practices in the wider Web world have an obligation to consider and discuss how we might apply these lessons in our own contexts. We might ask if the content we presently lock down could be made public with a license specifying reasonable terms for reuse. When choosing a content management system, we might consider how well it supports RSS syndication. In an excellent article in the March/April 2007 issue of EDUCAUSE Review, Joanne Berg, Lori Berquam, and Kathy Christoph listed a number of campus activities that could benefit from engaging social networking technologies.26

What might happen if we allow our campus innovators to integrate their practices in these areas in the same way that social networking application developers are already integrating theirs? What is the mission-critical data we cannot expose, and what can we expose with minimal risk? And if the notion of making data public seems too radical a step, can APIs be exposed to selected audiences, such as on-campus developers or consortia partners?