In traditional online communities, discussion is the center of the interaction and identity building. Members create relationships (and their own community identities) based on information they post in online discussions

identities can be built based on the display of the member’s choices of memberships in forums and connections to other people (among other things) on their home page.

Relationships in traditional communities are rarely made explicit.

Social networking, on the other hand, enables individual members to share explicit relationships with people and forums. Members use their home pages as rich representations of their preferences- which enable them to express their identity through explicitly shared forum membership and connections to other members.

Often, traditional online communities are managed so that new forums are built within a specific structure

An example of bucketed forums may be Technology-->Internet-->Online Communities-->Moderation Techniques-->Dealing with Spammers.

In social networking, the creation of new forums is done in a more emergent way and within a flatter hierarchy. A single member is free to create a new forum without placing it into a preset hierarchy.

New forums are a child of the whole system instead of being a child of a more general branch of the system. As new forums gain membership/popularity, they have equal opportunity to gain visibility in the system, similar to the weblog community.

Traditional discussion-based communities use discussion and/or organizations of discussions as the primary form of navigation. Members

Traditional discussion-based communities use discussion and/or organizations of discussions as the primary form of navigation.

The connections are held together by explicit relationships (people links) and interests (forum links) and do not depend on discussion content.

a time when scholarship, and how we make it available, will be affected by information abundance just as powerfully as food preparation has been.

Scholarly communication before the Internet required the intermediation of publishers. The costliness of publishing became an invisible constraint that drove nearly all of our decisions. It became the scholar's job to be a selector and interpreter of difficult-to-find primary and secondary sources; it was the scholarly publisher's job to identify the best scholars with the best perspective and the best access to scarce resources.

Online scholarly publishing in Web 1.0 mimicked those fundamental conceptions. The presumption was that information scarcity still ruled. Most content was closed to nonsubscribers; exceedingly high subscription costs for specialty journals were retained; libraries continued to be the primary market; and the "authoritative" version was untouched by comments from the uninitiated. Authority was measured in the same way it was in the scarcity world of paper: by number of citations to or quotations from a book or article, the quality of journals in which an article was published, the institutional affiliation of the author, etc.

Google

Google

The challenge for all those sites pertains to abundance:

Such systems have not been framed to confer authority, but as they devise means to deal with predators, scum, and weirdos wanting to be a "friend," they are likely to expand into "trust," or "value," or "vouching for my friend" metrics — something close to authority — in the coming years.

ecently some more "authoritative" editors have been given authority to override whining ax grinders.

In many respects Boing Boing is an old-school edited resource. It doesn't incorporate feedback or comments, but rather is a publication constructed by five editor-writers

As the online environment matures, most social spaces in many disciplines will have their own "boingboings."

They differ from current models mostly by their feasible computability in a digital environment where all elements can be weighted and measured, and where digital interconnections provide computable context.

In the very near future, if we're talking about a universe of hundreds of billions of documents, there will routinely be thousands, if not tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of documents that are very similar to any new document published on the Web. If you are writing a scholarly article about the trope of smallpox in Shakespearean drama, how do you ensure you'll be read? By competing in computability. Encourage your friends and colleagues to link to your online document. Encourage online back-and-forth with interested readers. Encourage free access to much or all of your scholarly work. Record and digitally archive all your scholarly activities. Recognize others' works via links, quotes, and other online tips of the hat. Take advantage of institutional repositories, as well as open-access publishers. The list could go on.

the new authority metrics, instead of relying on scholarly publishers to establish the importance of material for them.

They need to play a role in deciding not just what material will be made available online, but also how the public will be allowed to interact with the material. That requires a whole new mind-set.

cholarly publishers

Many of the values of scholarship are not well served yet by the Web: contemplation, abstract synthesis, construction of argument.

Traditional models of authority will probably hold sway in the scholarly arena for 10 to 15 years, while we work out the ways in which scholarly engagement and significance can be measured in new kinds of participatory spaces.

if scholarly output is locked away behind fire walls, or on hard drives, or in print only, it risks becoming invisible to the automated Web crawlers, indexers, and authority-interpreters that are being developed. Scholarly invisibility is rarely the path to scholarly authority.

Web 1.0,

garbed new business and publishing models in 20th-century clothes.

fundamental presumption is one of endless information abundance.

Flickr, YouTube

micromarkets

multiple demographics

Abundance leads to immediate context and fact checking, which changes the "authority market" substantially. The ability to participate in most online experiencesvia comments, votes, or ratingsis now presumed, and when it's not available, it's missed.

Google interprets a link from Page A to Page B as a vote, by Page A, for Page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; for example, it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves 'important' weigh more heavily and help to make other pages 'important,'"

It has its limits, but it also both confers and confirms authority because people tend to point to authoritative sources to bolster their own work.

That kind of democratization of authority is nearly unique to wikis that are group edited, since not observation, but active participation in improvement, is the authority metric.

user-generated authority, many of which are based on algorithmic analysis of participatory engagement. The emphasis in such models is often not on finding scarce value, but on weeding abundance

Authority 3.0 will probably include (the list is long, which itself is a sign of how sophisticated our new authority makers will have to be): Prestige of the publisher (if any). Prestige of peer prereviewers (if any). Prestige of commenters and other participants. Percentage of a document quoted in other documents. Raw links to the document. Valued links, in which the values of the linker and all his or her other links are also considered. Obvious attention: discussions in blogspace, comments in posts, reclarification, and continued discussion. Nature of the language in comments: positive, negative, interconnective, expanded, clarified, reinterpreted. Quality of the context: What else is on the site that holds the document, and what's its authority status? Percentage of phrases that are valued by a disciplinary community. Quality of author's institutional affiliation(s). Significance of author's other work. Amount of author's participation in other valued projects, as commenter, editor, etc. Reference network: the significance rating of all the texts the author has touched, viewed, read. Length of time a document has existed. Inclusion of a document in lists of "best of," in syllabi, indexes, and other human-selected distillations. Types of tags assigned to it, the terms used, the authority of the taggers, the authority of the tagging system.

Most technophile thinkers out there believe that Web 3.0 will be driven by artificial intelligences — automated computer-assisted systems that can make reasonable decisions on their own, to preselect, precluster, and prepare material based on established metrics, while also attending very closely to the user's individual actions, desires, and historic interests, and adapting to them.

76% of gaming teens play games with others at least some of the time. 82% play games alone at least occasionally, though 71% of this group also plays games with others. 65% of gaming teens play with others in the same room.

76% of youth report helping others while gaming. 44% report playing games where they learn about a problem in society.

12-14 year olds are equally as likely to play Mature and Adults Only rated games as their 15-17 year old counterparts.

“Gaming is a ubiquitous part of life for both boys and girls. For most teens, gaming runs the spectrum from blow-‘em-up mayhem to building communities; from cute-and-simple to complex; from brief private sessions to hours’ long interactions with masses of others.”

A focus of the survey was the relationship between gaming and civic experiences among teens. The goal was to test concerns that gaming might be prompting teens to withdraw from their communities. It turns out there is clear evidence that gaming is not just an entertaining diversion for many teens; gaming can be tied to civic and political engagement. Indeed, youth have many experiences playing games that mirror aspects of civic and political life, such as thinking about moral and ethical issues and making decisions about city and/or community affairs. Not only do many teens help others or learn about a problem in society during their game playing, they also encounter other social and civic experiences:

Moreover, the survey indicates that youth who have these kinds of civic gaming experiences are more likely to be civically engaged in the offline world. They are more likely than others are to go online to get information about current events, to try to persuade others how to vote in an election, to say they are committed to civic participation, and to raise money for charity.

Youth, parents, teachers, and others who work with youth should know about the wide diversity of video games – so they can take full advantage of games and their civic potential.”

The study also found that these civic gaming experiences occurred equally among all kinds of game players regardless of family income, race, and ethnicity. These data stand in contrast to teens’ experiences in schools and others community situations, where white and higher-income youth typically have more opportunities for civic development.

“This study offers us a glimpse into the potential of these new tools to foster learning and civic engagement, yet the findings about mature content suggest that parents and other adults need to be involved in young people’s game play, helping to realize the potential benefits while moderating unintended consequences. We see these results as the beginning of an important discussion about the role of digital media in learning, community, and citizenship in the 21st century.”

virtually all American teens play computer, console, or cell phone games and that the gaming experience is rich and varied, with a significant amount of social interaction and potential for civic engagement.

A typical teen plays at least five different categories of games and 40% of them play eight or more different game types.

76% of youth report helping others while gaming. 44% report playing games where they learn about a problem in society.

gaming can be tied to civic and political engagement. Indeed, youth have many experiences playing games that mirror aspects of civic and political life, such as thinking about moral and ethical issues and making decisions about city and/or community affairs. Not only do many teens help others or learn about a problem in society during their game playing, they also encounter other social and civic experiences:

“Games that simulate aspects of civic and political life may well promote civic skills and civic engagement. Youth, parents, teachers, and others who work with youth should know about the wide diversity of video games – so they can take full advantage of games and their civic potential.”

This study offers us a glimpse into the potential of these new tools to foster learning and civic engagement, yet the findings about mature content suggest that parents and other adults need to be involved in young people’s game play, helping to realize the potential benefits while moderating unintended consequences. We see these results as the beginning of an important discussion about the role of digital media in learning, community, and citizenship in the 21st century.”

an unexpected side-effect of constant self-disclosure. The act of stopping several times a day to observe what you’re feeling or thinking can become, after weeks and weeks, a sort of philosophical act. It’s like the Greek dictum to “know thyself,” or the therapeutic concept of mindfulness.

Having an audience can make the self-reflection even more acute, since, as my interviewees noted, they’re trying to describe their activities in a way that is not only accurate but also interesting to others: the status update as a literary form.

This is the paradox of ambient awareness. Each little update — each individual bit of social information — is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends’ and family members’ lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting. This was never before possible, because in the real world, no friend would bother to call you up and detail the sandwiches she was eating. The ambient information becomes like “a type of E.S.P.,” as Haley described it to me, an invisible dimension floating over everyday life.

Twitters

ad hoc, self-organizing socializing.

when they do socialize face to face, it feels oddly as if they’ve never actually been apart. They don’t need to ask, “So, what have you been up to?” because they already know. Instead, they’ll begin discussing something that one of the friends Twittered that afternoon, as if picking up a conversation in the middle.

When students woke up that September morning and saw News Feed, the first reaction, generally, was one of panic.

He created a Facebook group demanding Zuckerberg either scrap News Feed or provide privacy options.

Zuckerberg, surprised by the outcry, quickly made two decisions. The first was to add a privacy feature to News Feed, letting users decide what kind of information went out. But the second decision was to leave News Feed otherwise intact. He suspected that once people tried it and got over their shock, they’d like it.He was right. Within days, the tide reversed.

he bits of trivia that News Feed delivered gave them more things to talk about — Why do you hate Kiefer Sutherland? — when they met friends face to face in class or at a party. Trends spread more quickly. When one student joined a group — proclaiming her love of Coldplay or a desire to volunteer for Greenpeace — all her friends instantly knew, and many would sign up themselves. Users’ worries about their privacy seemed to vanish within days, boiled away by their excitement at being so much more connected to their friends.

It catalyzed a massive boom in the site’s growth.

We provide ample support and encouragement to "trailing edge" students whose online capabilities barely extend beyond e-mail, but at the same time, we leave the door open for those at the leading edge to suggest innovations that we ourselves would be incapable of imagining, much less of implementing.

By recasting students as researchers and teachers, we invite them to participate in what is arguably the most exciting and fulfilling aspect of university life: the production of new knowledge (Exhibit 2).

We would be hard pressed to name a profession—including academe itself—that does not demand some ability to interact effectively with other human beings. Yet higher education remains, especially in the humanities, a highly individualistic enterprise. In a typical English course, students write their essays for an audience of one—namely, the instructor who does the grading—while "group discussions" frequently consist of individuals talking directly to the teacher with little regard for their peers. In a discipline built around the ideal of the lone genius, our epigraph to this section remains as wishfully subversive today as it was a century and a half ago.

Teaching to the future involves harnessing the collaborative impulses already at large in digital culture and directing them toward educational ends, so that "group work" shifts in our students' perception from an eyeroll-inducing educational gimmick to a cutting-edge skill worthy of cultivation and scrutiny.

Later, they take part in a formative peer assessment exercise during which we project draft versions of their final projects onscreen while classmates ask questions and provide suggestions for improvement. The success of this "Live Crit" session (a concept borrowed from architecture and the fine arts) reflects the atmosphere of collaboration and trust that we have consciously cultivated among the students all semester

Exhibit 4).

Higher education is an aquifer, not a spigot.

"The Poem of the Contents of Everybody's Pockets"; on the second day, we send them off around campus to chalk poems on the ground in public places; on the third day, we engage them in a critical analysis of both events, prompting them to come up with inventive ways in which such multifaceted live performances might be recorded (photographed? taped? videoed? narrativized?) for posterity.

(Exhibit 7).

with the students' enthusiastic permission—as permanent exhibits in the Archives section of our course Web site

Exhibit 3

"In the coming decades," warns hypertext theorist Jerome McGann, "the entirety of our cultural inheritance will be transformed and re-edited in digital forms," a monumental task for which both we and our students remain, by and large, seriously underprepared (2005, 181).

to teach our students not to follow in our footsteps but to outstrip us.

“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.

Perhaps the most important breakthrough was Google's willingness to relinquish control of the user-end of the transaction, instead of trying to lock them in with proprietary technology and restrictive licensing

O'Reilly took a second Web 2.0 principle from Peer-to-Peer pioneer BitTorrent, which works by completely decentralising the delivery of files, with every client also functioning as a server. The more popular a file, is, the faster it can be served, since there are more users providing bandwidth and fragments of the file. Thus, "the service automatically gets better the more people use it".

Taking another model from open source, users are treated as "co-developers", actively encouraged to contribute, and monitored in real time to see what they are using, and how they are using it.

"Until Web 2.0 the learning curve to creating websites was quite high, complex, and a definite barrier to entry," says the third of our triumvirate of Tims, Tim Bray, director of Web Technologies at Sun Microsystems.

Web 2.0 takes some of its philosophical underpinning from James Surowiecki's book The Wisdom of Crowds, which asserts that the aggregated insights of large groups of diverse people can provide better answers and innovations than individual experts.

In practice, even fewer than 1% of people may be making a useful contribution - but these may be the most energetic and able members of a very large community. In 2006 1,000 people, just 0.003% of its users, contributed around two-thirds of Wikipedia's edits.

Ajax speeds up response times by enabling just part of a page to be updated, instead of downloading a whole new page. Nielsen's objections include that this breaks the "back" button - the ability to get back to where you've been, which Nielsen says is the second most used feature in Web navigation.

"Everybody who has a Web browser has got that platform," says Berners-Lee, in a podcast available on IBM's developerWorks site. "So the nice thing about it is when you do code up an Ajax implementation, other people can take it and play with it."

Web 2.0 is a step on the way to the Semantic Web, a long-standing W3C initiative to create a standards-based framework able to understand the links between data which is related in the real world, and follow that data wherever it resides, regardless of application and database boundaries.

The problem with Web 2.0, Pemberton says, is that it "partitions the web into a number of topical sub-webs, and locks you in, thereby reducing the value of the network as a whole."

How do you decide which social networking site to join? he asks. "Do you join several and repeat the work?" With the Semantic Web's Resource Description Framework (RDF), you won't need to sign up to separate networks, and can keep ownership of your data. "You could describe it as a CSS for meaning: it allows you to add a small layer of markup to your page that adds machine-readable semantics."

The problems with Web 2.0 lock-in which Pemberton describes, were illustrated when a prominent member of the active 1%, Robert Scoble, ran a routine called Plaxo to try to extract details of his 5,000 contacts from Facebook, in breach of the site's terms of use, and had his account disabled. Although he has apparently had his account reinstated, the furore has made the issue of Web 2.0 data ownership and portability fiercely topical.

when Google announced its OpenSocial set of APIs, which will enable developers to create portable applications and bridges between social networking websites, Facebook was not among those taking part. Four years after O'Reilly attempted to define Web 2.0, Google, it seems, remains the standard-bearer, while others are forgetting what it was supposed to be about.

these spaces conveniently lend themselves to almost seamless integration of content from other online resources, often quite transparently

They are easy to create, and they allow people to jointly collaborate on complex projects using low-cost, simple tools.

The essential attribute of the technologies in this set is that they make it easy for people to share interests and ideas, work on joint projects, and easily monitor collective progress. All of these are needs common to student work, research, collaborative teaching, writing and authoring, development of grant proposals, and more. Using them, groups can collaborate on projects online, anywhere there is Internet access; interim results of research can be shared among a team, supporting illustrations and tables created, and all changes and iterations tracked, documented, and archived. In class situations, faculty can evaluate student work as it progresses, leaving detailed comments right in the documents if desired in almost real time. Students can work with other students in distant locations, or with faculty as they engage in fieldwork.

Support needs are greatly reduced as nothing needs to be installed or upgraded.

A virtual collaborative workspace for a course or study group can be assembled quickly using tools, or widgets, that can pull information from a variety of sources

The same tools can be used to set up a personal portfolio where a student can display his or her work in any form—photos, blog posts, shared videos, and more can be pulled to the page by widgets that grab the student’s contributions on other sites.

Using similar approaches, online conferences and symposia can offer session archives that persist over time; simply request that participants use a particular tag when they post related content, and the widgets will continue to update the conference page as new content appears.

Instead of the campus LMS, the courses use Facebook as their primary interaction and information tool.

A course in Digital Entrepreneurship at Rochester Institute of Technology created a Ning network on the topic, bringing undergrads enrolled in the course into contact with over a hundred graduate students, venture capitalists, faculty, practitioners, and business owners around the world.

An educational technology course at George Mason University uses Pageflakes as the hub of a learning community. Content is dynamically assembled from a variety of timely sources, integrating it with student work from Flickr and other sources, all via RSS.

The Flat Classroom Project (flatclassroomproject.ning.com) uses a Ning workspace to create a sense of space that is shared by students located in the U.S. and in Qatar.

to allow faculty to collaborate on course materials and leverage one another’s work.

Amateur cinematographers and musicians use hosting sites to reach a broader audience for their work and to build a network of fans. Increasingly, learning organizations, faculty, scholars, and students are using these tools as well, and in the coming year, it is very likely that such practice will enter the mainstream of use in these institutions.

Two professors

video illustrates the mathematical concept i

video has been watched more than 1.2 million times since it was put on YouTube.

VideoANT is an online environment developed at the University of Minnesota that synchronizes web-based video with an author’s timeline-based text annotations. VideoANT is designed to engage learners by supporting interactions between students, instructors, and their video content.

Examples of Grassroots Video

They are indicative of the changing nature of the way we communicate, access information, and connect with peers and colleagues.

Virtually anyone can capture, edit, and share short video clips, using inexpensive equipment (such as a cell phone) and free or nearly free software.

In the coming years, we will see educational applications for both explicit collective intelligence—evidenced in projects like the Wikipedia and in community tagging—and implicit collective intelligence, or data gathered from the repeated activities of numbers of people, including search patterns, cell phone locations over time, geocoded digital photographs, and other data that are passively obtained.

Nonetheless, while there are abundant examples of personal and professional uses for mobiles, educational content delivery via mobile devices is still in the early stages. The expectation is that advances in technology over the next twelve to eighteen months will remove the last barriers to access and bring mobiles truly into the mainstream for education.

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?