Jon Aske
Foreign Languages Department

• Outline
  • Introduction
  • What is Web 2.0
  • Wikis
  • Blogs
  • Social Networking
  • Podcasting
  • Other Instantiations of Web 2.0
  • Final thoughts
  • Some Interesting Links

Introduction

Anyone who has been surfing the Web for a while, as most people probably have, has probably noticed that the Web has changed somewhat in the past ten years. Some sites may not have changed at all, but others offer options which were not available during the first decade of the Web. It is perfectly possible that you have glossed over some of these changes, if you haven’t become a participant, and that you have failed to appreciate their import, but for some they represent a revolutionary change, something which allows people to interact with the sites themselves and with others in novel ways.

Some have taken to talk about the new improved Web as Web 2.0—using the analogy of software update numbering—as opposed to the simpler, non-interactive original Web, which is thus referred to as Web 1.0. Another name for the phenomenon is social media.

What are these revolutionary changes and what consequences do they have for educators? Here I will attempt to provide a primer on Web 2.0 for those who may have missed these new developments, focusing on their import for educators and concentrating on the major exponents of the new paradigm: Wikis, blogs, and podcasting, with a few others added for good measure.

What is Web 2.0

Let’s start with a definition and, not surprisingly, we find a good one at one of the best exemplars of Web 2.0, namely Wikipedia. According to Wikipedia’s entry on this topic,

The term “Web 2.0” describes the changing trends in the use of World Wide Web technology and web design that aim to enhance creativity, communications, secure information sharing, collaboration and functionality of the web. Web 2.0 concepts have led to the development and evolution of web-culture communities and hosted services, such as social-networking sites, video sharing sites, wikis, blogs, and folksonomies. The term first became notable after the O’Reilly Media Web 2.0 conference in 2004… Although the term suggests a new version of the World Wide Web, it does not refer to an update to any technical specifications, but rather to changes in the ways software developers and end-users utilize the Web.”

In other words, Web 2.0 is all about allowing and fostering connectedness, collaboration, and sharing on the Web in ways that were not possible before, and to make it very simple so that anybody can use it with a minimum of sophistication.

To be sure, there were Internet-based tools to foster interconnectedness before Web 2.0, but they were simpler in some ways, as well as more complex to use, and they were not Web-based. Take email, for instance, which academics have been using since at least the 1980’s (I got my first email account as an undergraduate in 1982 and have not looked back ever since). Email is nothing new, even if at Salem State it didn’t become an ubiquitous and common means of communication until the age of Web 2.0 was already under way. Still, most people nowadays when they want to check their email they don’t start up an email client program (the GroupWise client, in the case of Salem State email), but rather go straight to the Web. Access to email through the Web has become the norm, thanks to free email services such as Hotmail (owned by Microsoft), Yahoo Mail, and Gmail (owned by Google), with friendly user interfaces, which allow you to check your email on any computer, wherever you are. Salem State email is also available online and many faculty members check their email through a Web interface.

And, of course, even before the Web there were other Internet tools for connecting people, such as bulletin board systems (BBS), Usenet newsgroups, and electronic mailing lists (aka ‘listservs’ from the name of one of the early systems). These tools have not been totally replaced by Web 2.0. Indeed mailing lists are available at Salem State and much used in some departments for faculty to communicate with each other and to communicate with students.

Still, the new options afforded by what has come to be known as Web 2.0 are unique and have captured the imagination of our students’ generation, which is why faculty members should be aware of them and maybe even look for ways to utilize them for educational purposes.

Wikis

One aspect of Web 2.0 that you could not have missed as an educator is Wikipedia, and many other so-called wikis available on the Web. Wikis are sites the content of whose pages is created by the users themselves, something unheard of in the days of Web 1.0.

Faculty often disparage Wikipedia because of students’ tendency to treat it as their only source of information when they are doing research and to treat that information as reputable, which is not always the case. The truth is, however, that for the critical reader a large percentage of the pages on Wikipedia are very good sources of often very detailed information ands contain much more information (and very often just as good or even better) than that found in reputable encyclopedias. I believe that what we need to do is teach our students to treat Wikipedia information, and indeed all information, with a critical eye, and not as the only source. Still, I think that perhaps many people still don’t realize that Wikipedia, which is barely getting out of its infant stage, is indeed a revolutionary tool that democratizes the creation and dissemination of information and knowledge. It is certainly something that we cannot ignore as educators.

But Wikipedia is just an example of a wiki, albeit the largest and best known one. In search of a definition we can go to Wikipedia, of course, where we learn that a wiki is “is a page or collection of Web pages designed to enable anyone who accesses it to contribute or modify content … often used to create collaborative websites and to power community websites.” Wikis are something that anybody can create and that wikis are being used in educational settings for learning purposes.

I think the following clip, Wikis in Plain English, from commoncraft.com , which is available on YouTube (another exponent of Web 2.0), captures the essence of what a wiki is better than I can describe it in words. Don’t focus on the nature of the example provided, “planning a camping trip,” but, rather, try to imagine the possibilities.

Wikis in Plain English

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dnL00TdmLY

Educators have recognized the possibilities of using wikis in education, since they “encourage collaborative learning and information sharing” and “increase student engagement and participation” An example of a (free) place to get started creating educational wikis is wetpaint.com. At wetpaint.com there is even a wiki called Wikis in Education, where you can find and share ideas of how wikis are being used in education. This short video on Wetpaint wikis is also a good introduction to Wetpaint and to wikis, and it uses a different example from the one in the previous video.

Wetpaint Wikis in Plain English

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7BAU2XX5Ws

Blogs

Blogs are another major part of the Web 2.0 puzzle. You must have come across blogs in your travels through the Web, and you may have even noticed that they were somewhat different from other Web sites. But you may have failed to capture the significance of these differences. First of all, blogs have allowed absolutely anybody with an Internet connection to put content on the Web. You don’t need to know anything about Web site creation, html, uploading, or the like. You may be surprised to know that there are probably more than one hundred million blogs out there, many created by “regular people.” This is a veritable revolution in publishing, comparable perhaps to the one initiated by Guttenberg.

Whereas wikis allow a group of individuals to collaborate on an equal basis on creating information, blogs are more one-sided, giving primacy to one content creator, while still allowing for feedback and input from the readership.

For those who are still not clear about what a blog is, our (by now) friends at commoncraft.com have done a great job of explaining it:

Blogs in Plain English

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NN2I1pWXjXI

So, as you can see, blogs allow not just anybody to become a publisher, but they also allow interaction between the publisher and their readers, as well as among the readers themselves.

There are directories of blogs, by the way, where you can find the one that deals with just what interests you. One of the best known ones is Technorati. But you may also come across them during one of your Google searches (though blog creators may choose not to have their blogs indexed by search engines, if they don’t want).

Blogs allow us to create not just running commentary, but also, for instance, to publish newsletters, such as this very one, ASpect, and the Foreign Languages Department’s Lingua Franca, with no need to have any special knowledge. Indeed, some prefer to use the term Web publication in these cases, rather than blog (which originally at least stood for Web log), although the mechanism is identical. If you want to create your own blog, you can head straight to a number of free blogging sites, such as wordpress.com or blogspot.com. Salem State College is currently in the process of providing blog capabilities for faculty and students, with support from ITS.

As you could have expected, educators have been looking for ways to adapt and use blogs for educational purposes. Educators have used blogs “to assist people to publish work, represent themselves online, interact with their peers as part of an organic community and manage their own digital content and identity.”

In this issue of ASpect you can see an example of how a faculty member at Salem State College is using blogs in his classes. Another example would be the blogs that Salem State College students abroad using blogs to reflect and share their experiences with fellow students and faculty (here is one, and here is another one).

Part of the interesting nature of blogs is that they change constantly, by virtue of new entries being created. However, you may run into an interesting blog in your Web travels and then forget to visit them again. How are you going to know about new changes if you don’t go visit the blog’s web pages? Blog readers, not just blog addicts, who also exist, often use what is known as a feed aggregator, feed reader, or news reader, to keep up with updates to their favorite blogs. A favorite one is Google’s news reader, which works simply enough. Once you have your free Google account, which gives you access to the Google reader among many other things, when you visit a blog you want to keep up with, you “subscribe” to it by clicking on the subscription (aka syndication) link (it will be an icon that looks like this: ). Then every time you visit your Google reader page (which you can turn into your “home page” if you want), you will be notified of all the new entries in all the blogs that you have subscribed to.

Social Networking

Social Networking is another great example of the use of the Web to create and foster communities of people, “friends” in the social networking parlance. And, of course, these communities can be communities of learners, or colleagues, just like they can be communities of any other type. The most ubiquitous of these systems in academia is perhaps Facebook. In the past couple of years, a large number of Salem State  faculty and students have become members of Facebook, which allows faculty and students stay connected with each other—as much or as little as they want—and share things with each other , again as much or as little as they want.

Once you join Facebook you can acquire “friends” and you can join networks (such as Salem State College network, for which all you need is a Salem State College email address). You can also join “groups” inside or outside those networks to stay connected with other people. Some of the groups in the Salem State College network that I myself belong to are the Professional Writing at Salem State College group, the Spanish Club group, the Spanish Majors group, and the Peace Institute group. And, of course, you can create your very own groups which you can invite your “friends” to join. Then you can share information, such as upcoming events, with group members. Facebook also has a handy feature for RSVPs and for automatically tracking events in a personalized calendar.

Facebook has become the tool of choice for many of our students to communicate with each oher . They send messages through Facebook (those who do not visit regularly can have Facebook notify them by email of the existence of those messages at the Facebook site, with a link to the message, which makes things very easy). One can even leave messages for one’s friends on their “wall,” an electronic version of a message board, which is visible to their other friends.

As faculty members, you may want to join other networks, such as that of your alma mater, to keep in touch with old friends. The possibilities are truly amazing. Why don’t you give it a try? Click here and create your own account.

Again, commoncraft.com has a very good basic introduction to Social Networking.

Social Networking in Plain English

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6a_KF7TYKVc

Podcasting

Podcasting of audio and video is another example of Web 2.0. You can make media available for people to access online with very little knowledge of how the technology works. If you own an iPod, you may have already discovered podcasts. Most NPR programs are available on podcast, for example. This means you can have your subscribed podcasts downloaded to your iPod, and listen to them or watch them on your own time. (My favorite non-academic podcasts are NPR’s Ira Flatow’s Science Friday and Click & Clack’s CarTalk.)

Again, since a picture, or a video, is probably worth a thousand words, here is a simple explanation of what podcasting is all about:

Podcasting in Plain English

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-MSL42NV3c

You won’t be surprised to know that colleges all over are using podcasting to put lectures online, which students can then listen to or watch on their iPods (or equivalent hardware), which nowadays can play video in addition to sound files. There is even a name for this: coursecasting. As you can imagine, there are still many issues to be resolved, such as who owns the rights to the podcasts, which is usually assumed to be the professors themselves, but I think you can get an idea of how useful this resource can be for students and how it is destined to be an integral part of teaching and learning in a not too distant future, especially since our students are all already joined at the hip to one of these contraptions for entertainment.

By the way, you don’t need to set up a podcasting service to share audio and video files with your students. A blog will do. And if you want to restrict who has access to this blog, you can do that too. It is up to you to determine who can visit your sites, whether it is anybody who stumbles upon it or just those whom you invite.

Other Instantiations of Web 2.0

As I said earlier, the tools that we have seen so far fall under the rubric of social media, a generic term for the many tools that instantiate Web 2.0. The term social media is used in contradistinction to Industrial media, such as newspapers or television. Anybody now can be a media publisher. If this is not a revolution, then what is? The following video gives a global perspective on social media, which may help you put it all together if you are still feeling confused about wikis, blogs, and so on.

Social Media in Plain English

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpIOClX1jPE

There are other examples of Web 2.0 possibilities which you may or may not know about and which may have educational implications.

Social bookmarking is another great new way to share things with others, in this case bookmarks (aka favorites, for users of Internet Explorer), the links you collect to pages and sites on the Web. Basically, with such bookmarking systems, “users save links to web pages that they want to remember and/or share. These bookmarks are usually public, and can be saved privately, shared only with specified people or groups, shared only inside certain networks, or another combination of public and private domains. The allowed people can usually view these bookmarks chronologically, by category or tags, or via a search engine.” One of the pioneers of social bookmarking is del.icio.us, which also coined the term social bookmarking. You may have come across this term online before. Digg is another commonly used social bookmarking system. Stumbleupon is a similar “recommendation” system that you may have stumbled upon.

As you guessed, there is a simple explanation of how social bookmarking works from Commoncraft. Here it is:

Social Bookmarking in Plain English

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x66lV7GOcNU

Finally, another well-known example of Web 2.0 technology is online photo sharing. It doesn’t take a degree in computer science anymore to put your personal or professional digital pictures online and to share them either with the whole wide world, or with people of your choosing. I will let commoncraft.com tell you all about online photo sharing, since they do such a great job:

Online Photo Sharing in Plain English

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPU4awtuTsk

Flikr.com is a pioneer of photo sharing and one of the best-known providers, especially if you want to share your photos unrestrictedly. My personal favorite is Picasa, a free network made available by Google, which also provides an excellent and free standalone program for managing your pictures on your computer, which allows you to upload your pictures to the Picasaweb site.

By the way, once the pictures are online it is easy for those with access to them to order prints for a fraction of what it used to cost to get prints made. Also, if you are a member of Facebook (see above), you already have a way to upload photos and share them with your Facebook friends.

Final thoughts

I hope this basic introduction to Web 2.0 and its major instantiations has piqued your curiosity and has gotten you thinking about their implications for education in general, and for your own teaching. There are many faculty members at Salem State who are trying to incorporate aspects of Web 2.0 into their teaching, who would be glad to help you get started and help you along. The Center for Teaching Innovation on campus is a great resource. Whatever tickles your fancy, you are not alone. Explore and discover new ways to reach your students. And after you find something that works, don’t forget to share it with others. That’s what it’s all about. If you are on Facebook, you may want to join the SSC Online Educators Group to share your joys and frustrations. There you will meet other SSC faculty who are muddling through this new terrain.

Some interesting links

Wikis and education

• Encyclopedia of Educational Technology: Wikis: http://coe.sdsu.edu/eet/Articles/wikis/index.htm

• 10 Best Practices for using wikis in education: http://itcboisestate.wordpress.com/2008/05/21/10-best-practices-for-using-wikis-in-education/

• Shambles: Wikis and Education: http://www.shambles.net/pages/learning/ict/wikiedu/

• Wide Open Spaces: Wikis, Ready or Not, Brian Lamb, EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 39, no. 5 (September/October 2004): 36–48: http://connect.educause.edu/Library/EDUCAUSE+Review/WideOpenSpacesWikisReadyo/4049, http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ERM0452.pdf (PDF)

Blogs and education

• Top 100 Education Blogs: http://oedb.org/library/features/top-100-education-blogs

• Blogs in Education: http://techteachers.com/blogs.htm

Podcasting in education

• Podcasting in Education: http://chatt.hdsb.ca/~magps/boylit/Podcasting%20in%20Education

• There is Something in the Air-Podcasting in Education: http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/erm0561.pdf

• Podcasting and Education: A conversation with Rice University’s Jeffrey Daniel Frey, by Linda L Briggs, 01/16/08: http://campustechnology.com/Articles/2008/01/Podcasting-and-Education.aspx

• How to Podcast Campus Lectures: Advice on getting your institution’s ‘coursecasting’ program off to a good start, by Brock Read, The Chronicle of Higher Education, January 26, 2007, Section: Information Technology, Volume 53, Issue 21, Page A32: http://chronicle.com/free/v53/i21/21a03201.htm