Academia and/or Web 2.0

NFAISPhiladelphia

February

2008

Plan of the talk

1. 10 essential pieces of Web 2.0 for academia

2. Pedagogies and publics

3. The divide(Middlebury waterfall, spring 2006)

One problem

How does academia apprehend emerging technologies?

•Panic/siege mode•Vendors•Futurism methods•Networks

One metaphor

Web 2.0 and education is like gaming and education: awareness is challenging

• Huge, financially and quantitatively successful worlds

• Global and rapidly developing scope• Bad anxieties, policies, and media

coverage• Perceived lack of seriousness

Five responses

Web 2.0 and education is like gaming and education: intersections are happening

• Take advantage of preexisting projects and services

• Mod/warp/hack • DIY• Literacy: new media• Influence

(World of Warcraft)

I. Web 2.0Microcontent, rather than sites or large documents

(NITLE blog Liberal Education Today, http://b2e.nitle.org)

I. Web 2.0

Multiply authored microcontent

Open content and/or services and/or standards…

(Pepysblog, 2003-)

…leading to networked conversations

(Pepysblog, 2003-)

O’Reilly: Web 2.0 is a platform for development

• Open APIs• Access to data• Virtue of the lazyweb

(http://www.hurricanearchive.org/, Center for History and New Media,George Mason University)

• Programming staff• Perceived recognition

Wikis are (often) textually productive-Viégas, Wattenberg, Dave (Historyflow, IBM, 2004)

“Technorati is now tracking over 70 million weblogs, and we're seeing about 120,000 new weblogs being created worldwide each day. That's about 1.4 blogs created every second of every day.”

(David Sifry,

April 2007)

State of the blogosphere, more• 12 people million using three

platforms, including LiveJournal: majority women (Anil Dash, MeshForum 2006)

• Diversity: diaries, public intellectuals, carnivals, knitters, moblogs, warblogs home and abroad…

NIH guidelines, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/bv.fcgi?rid=citmed.section.61024

Implications of Flickr

• Metadata is good enough

• Gaming can inspire design and architecture

(Ben Harris-Roxas, 2006)

Tagging museums: the Steve project

• Users tag differently

• Curators get it

(Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2004)

Tagging libraries: PennTags• Coded locally• Also tags the open web

http://tags.library.upenn.edu/

Extrapolating principles: Ton Zylstra on the social object:

“In general you could say that both Flickr and del.icio.us work in a triangle: person, picture/ bookmark, and tag(s). Or more abstract a person, an object of sociality, and some descriptor...”

(Zylstra in Second Life, 2007)

“…In every triangle there always needs to be a person and an object of sociality. The third point of the triangle is free to define[,] as it were.”

-http://www.zylstra.org, 2006(emphases added)

(“Online Communities”, XKCD, April 2007 )

For academia, this can seem a bit overwhelming

Pedagogies and publications

Teaching with Web 2.0: it’s not all new - Web 1.0, internet pedagogies• Hypertext• Web audience• Discussion fora • Collaborative document authoring• Groupware

Teaching with Web 2.0: it’s not all new

Earlier pedagogies• Journaling• Media literacy

Teaching with Web 2.0: principles

http://smarthistory.blogspot.com/

Distributed conversation

Collaborative writing

Object-oriented discussion

Connectivism (G. Siemens, 2004)

Wiki pedagogies• Collective

research• Group writing• Document

editing• Information

literacy• Discussion• Knowledge

accretion(Romantic Audiences project

Bowdoin College, 2005-present

• Discussion• Knowledge

accretion

Social object pedagogies

• Prompts• Discussion

object• Compositio

n materials

More social object pedagogies• Annotate details• Remix (“Make it mine”) Edugadget

http://www.edugadget.com/2005/05/07/flickr-creative-commons

Teaching with Web 2.0: “net.gen”:“Fully half of all teens and 57 percent of

teens who use the Internet could be considered Content Creators, according to a survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.”

http://www.pewtrusts.com/pdf/PIP_Teens_1105.pdf

“[S]tudents… write words on paper, yes— but… also compose words and images and create audio files on Web logs (blogs), in word processors, with video editors and Web editors and in e-mail and on presentation software and in instant messaging and on listservs and on bulletin boards—and no doubt in whatever genre will emerge in the next ten minutes.

Note that no one is making anyone do any of this writing.”

Kathleen Blake Yancey, "Made Not Only in Words: Composition in a New Key." CCC 56.2 (2004):297-328.Emphasis added.

RSS pedagogies• Shaping Web reading• Pushing student-created

content (mother blog, Feed to Javascript)

• Web 2.0 wrangling

(Bloglines)

Academic open archives for social media

Freesound archive

•DIY copyright•Social networking values•University of Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona)

(http://freesound.iua.upf.edu/)

Podcasts and teaching: profcasting

• Bryn Mawr College: Michelle Francl, chemistry

• Duke: “Classroom recording”

• Learning objects: Gardner Campbell, University of Richmond

• Duke: “Course content dissemination”

• Information literacy

Student program podcasting on campus

• War News Radio (Swarthmore College)

•PEPI courses (University of British Columbia, department of Land and Food Resources)

Media to enhance other media

• Podcast + pdfs: Allegheny College, Gothcast

Podcasts and research• Public intellectual

– Out of the Past– Engines of Our

Ingenuity – In Our Time– University

Channel– The Missing Link

New forms of scholarly communication

CommentPress implementation, Institute for the Future of the BooksMcKenzie Wark, Eugene Lang College

More bookblogging

Still more bookblogging

Siva Vaidhyanathan, University of Virginia

Combining Web 2.0 forms• Podcasting• Blogging• Digital storytelling• Web-based photography• YouTube• Video mashups

Middlebury College, Jason Mittell and Barbara Ganley

• Blend teaching with research

• BG now involved in rural community media

Web 2.0 academic concerns

• Contrary to class safe space (Gary Kornblith, Oberlin College)

• Culture of too much disclosure• Problem increasing archivally

Web 2.0 academic concernsSome responses• Can block comments and/or

readers• Teachable moment: what is

privacy in 2008?• Complement other practices

Web 2.0 academic concernsLocal hosting • Campus identity• Stability• Integration into

other services• Preservation• Time

Offshore hosting• Third party

identity• Stability• Integration into

their other services

• Preservation• Different time

III. The divide

(Valdis Krebs, 2004)

The wide reach of the CMS

Blackboard

•Huge market share•Copyright•Privacy•Familiarity

The persistence of fears

C.S. Mott Children's Hospital National Poll on Children’s Health, May 2007

CMSes approach Web 2.0

Scholar.com, from Blackboard Beyond

National Institute for Technology and Liberal

Education(NITLE) http://nitle.org

Liberal Education Today blog http://b2e.nitle.org