Web 2.0: Salvation or Hype?

A summary of:

What is Web 2.0? Ideas, technologies and implications for education / Paul AndersonJISC Technology and Standards Watch, Feb

2007

http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/techwatch/tsw0701b.pdf

Roger Mills

What is Web 2.0?

• Web 2.0: does it exist?• Social web – blogs, wikis, RSS feeds,

podcasts etc• According to Tim Berners-Lee, this is

what the WWW was intended to be all along – the ability for everyone to view and edit any web page

Blogs

• Term coined 1997• Blogosphere now incorporates

multimedia – photo-blogs, v(ideo) blogs, uploads from mobiles (mob-blogging)

• Facilitates syndication and linking – but blog permalinks link pages not content – may not stay same

• 13million blogs but 10million inactive

Wikis

• Have history and rollback functions to restore previous versions – blogs do not

• Self-moderation v. malicious editing

Tagging

• Social bookmarking – stored centrally and shared

• Tagged with (multiple) keywords• Also used for photos (Flickr), video

(YouTube), Odeo (podcasts [=audio blogs])

• CiteULike – store, organise and share academic papers

RSS

• Lists updates to websites, blogs or podcasts

• Collected and piped to users by syndication

• Several versions of RSS• New syndication system developed -

2003: Atom• Open standards

Newer Web 2.0 services

• Social networking• Aggregation services• Data ‘mash-ups’• Tracking and filtering content• Collaborating• Replicate office-style software in browser• Source ideas or work from the crowd

6 Key ideas

1. Individual production and User Generated Content

2. Harness the power of the crowd3. Data on an epic scale4. Architecture of Participation5. Network effects6. Openness

1. User Generated Content

• Self-publishing growth similar to that engendered by laser printing and dtp

• Cheap, fairly high quality video equipment allows media to use users submissions eg news from ‘citizen journalists’

• Motives monetary at one end, reputation at the other

• End of editorial control – eg structure and authority of edited newspaper

2. Harnessing the power of the crowd

• Intelligence or information?• Cloudmark – collective spam filtering

– works better than machine analysis• Crowdsourcing: intermediary sites

which make UGC available for re-use• Threatens market for professionals

Folksonomy

• A collection of tags for individual use – not collaborative

• Allows links between individuals or sites with similar interests

• Repetition of tags indicate merging trends of interest

3. Data on an epic scale

• Ever-increasing amounts of data leading to ‘datafication’

• Google, Amazon, E-Bay rely on massive amounts of data generated by ordinary browsing to provide targeted services through learning

• Who owns this data? Re-purposing, reformatting, re-using - sinister implications?

4. Architecture of participation

• System utilises user interactions to improve itself

• Service improves the more people use it

5. Network effects

• Service increases in value to existing users as others start using it

• Can result in lock-in to technology eg MS Office

• Or adoption of inferior technology eg VHS over Betamax

• Niche areas become significant

6. Openness

• Power not in data itself but control of access to that data

• Aggregation and republishing obscure rights

Pedagogical implications

• Techno-centric assumptions obscure motivation

• Not all learners find self-production compelling

• Students entrenched in peer and mentoring communities may challenge accepted ideas of hierarchy and production/authentication of knowledge

• Privacy and plagiarism• Shared authorship and assessment

Whither VLEs?

• Students prefer Facebook for discussion of lecture materials downloaded from VLEs

• Develop Personalised Learnimg Environments – PLEs?

Scholarly Research

• Use of folksonomies in developing formal ontologies

• Cannot replace indexing/KM efforts using controlled vocabularies

• Can develop alongside to develop ‘collabularies’

• Private blogging for peer debate• Often anonymous• Collective blogs for peer and public

communication

Scholarly publishing

• First stage publishing may become web-only

• Only best and most durable info published conventionally

• Data mashing requires open access to data

• Open peer review

Libraries, repositories and archiving

• Library 2.0 services not necessarily product of Web 2.0 technologies

• Eg ILL comparable to Amazon delivery• People who borrowed this also borrowed…• Ethos of he long tail: everything has a value

beyond how many times it is requested• Tagging=indexing, blog

trackbacking=citation analysis, blog-rolling=chaining, RSS= alerting

• Web 2.0 can help understanding of user behaviour

Archiving

• Part of cultural memory• UK Web Archiving Consortium (UKWAC)• Many legal problems• Many technical problems• Web is transient• Depends on linked objects, in varying

formats all of which must be migrated• Graphical look and feel – do we need it?

Preserving Web 2.0 content

• Often held in databases, so part of hidden web

• Pages created dynamically – little technology to preserve developed yet

• APIs proprietary and in perpetual beta• Much data stored on servers owned by

American companies• Aggregated data as gathered e.g. by

Google of great historical interest

Web 2.0 archiving characteristics

• Link rot severe in blog archives• Users consider media-sharing services

archives already. But if company closes?

• Personal catalogues and collections – who is responsible for archiving?

• Web 2.0 not conducive to traditional archiving approaches

• Can we devise new ones?

Looking ahead

• Major IPR impact• Information overload• Anxiety if not ‘fully connected’• Personal catalogues = manifestations of

person’s persona• A person’s path through the information

space defines their lives• Who owns this information?• New ways of human interaction?

Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web

• Shift from documents to data on which machines act

• Not realised yet• Ontologies (costly) v. folksonomies

(free)• Semantic wikis and blogs –

annotated by machine• Trust, security and social networks

Technology Bubble 2.0?

• Unwise to invest too much time, resources and data in new and untested applications

• Proceed with caution!

And Web 3.0?

• High-powered graphics• Visualisation• 3-D social networking• 3-D Internet – merging web and

virtual world environments• Or a backlash to Web 2.0: software

that erases your digital path

Consequences of Web 2.0 for education

• Power of the crowd – new communities and groups

• Growth in self-generated content challenges exiting hierarchies

• Profound intellectual property debates

• Watch this space!