Parenthetical Aside #1: (This place has me thinking. A lot. My new life as an Instructional Designer has made it abundantly clear that something about the internet has changed. I’ve known this for some time, but have only recently had to articulate exactly how.)
Parenthetical Aside #2: (I’d heard the term “Web 2.0” bandied about, but never bothered to understand what it meant until now. Now I get it. It’s no longer a product and consumer interaction… it’s a collaboration and sharing interaction.)
Parenthetical Aside #3: (When I was a little girl, I dreamed about the day when we would have “video phones.” Video chat technology became, over the years, emblematic of The Future. I always imagined that when we had video phones, the Future would have arrived.)
Parenthetical Aside #4: (My need to articulate the changes surfaced most clearly a few days ago while trying to write about the term “Social Media.” The categories we use to identify and define web tools (especially those we call Social Media) are shifting. Andreas M. Kaplan and Michael Haenlein, in “The Challenges and Opportunities of Social Media” remarked that
“although most people would probably agree that Wikipedia, YouTube, Facebook, and Second Life are all [Social Media], there is no systematic way in which different Social Media applications can be categorized.”
The ever-evolving and dynamic nature of the web resists the kind of taxonomic methods used for more static entities. As soon as we define the parameters of Social Media, some new combination of technology, economy, and culture will disrupt our tidy mental filing system.)
Parenthetical Aside #5: (The fact that the term “social media” exists is indicative of a fundamental change in the way we connect to and use the internet. Our students are digital natives. For them, all media is social media. Their perception of the internet isn’t a product-consumer model; it’s a create-share model. Pedagogically, we cannot ignore the create-share nature of the digital landscape in which they have been raised.)
Something I Learned: Three things were needed in order for Web 2.0 to emerge: RSS, Flash, and AJAX
Not an Aside, but a Quote I Like:
“While UGC has already been available prior to Web 2.0, as discussed above, the combination of technological drivers (e.g., increased broadband availability and hardware capacity), economic drivers (e.g., increased availability of tools for the creation of UGC), and social drivers (e.g., rise of a generation of “digital natives’ and “screenagers’: younger age groups with substantial technical knowledge and willingness to engage online) make UGC nowadays fundamentally different from what was observed in the early 1980s.” Kaplan and Haenlein
Two Bullet Points:
- Marta Z. Kagan, author of the “Secret Diary of a Bonafide Marketing Genius” blog, has created a number of slide shows that pull together some very salient points about SM. This one is my favorite:
What the F**k is Social Media NOW?
- If social media is, as Kagan puts it,
“transparent, inclusive, authentic, vibrant, and consumer driven”
then shouldn’t we, as educators, think about our online classrooms in the same way?