Transcript UKeIGIM-Mills2 - Bodleian Libraries

Web 2.0: Salvation or Hype?
A summary of:
What is Web 2.0? Ideas, technologies and
implications for education / Paul Anderson
JISC 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
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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 crowd
3. Data on an epic scale
4. Architecture of Participation
5. Network effects
6. 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 webonly
• 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
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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
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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?
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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!