The Endicott Enquirer News from the Southern Tier

How to "Learn Web 2.0"

The Allegheny College RefIT group, composed of Instructional Technologists from OET and the Learning Commons and Reference Librarians from Pelletier Library, has chosen to conduct the Learning Web 2.0 by Diving In project during the spring and summer of 2007. This project is based on the Learning 2.0 project of the Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County, which is licensed under the Creative Commons license. Our site includes links to several of the 23 things, or tasks, that they originally created.

Learning Web 2.0 by Diving In

When I cam across this page, I couldn't resist commenting on it because I find it amusing that people need to be taught the concept of "Web 2.0" or "Social Media" when it is common sense to anyone who is actually using it or reading content that others have posted. I guess I just don't understand how you can teach someone Web 2.0, after all, did we need to teach people "Web 1.0?"

I don't think you can learn Web 2.0, it is not something concrete as it is always changing, it is more of a concept than any one hard piece of technology or any one particular website. That is the whole point about the medium is that the reader / viewer / participant is presented with a multitude of options that are community driven which means there is no centralized site that you can go to which is Web 2.0. Technorati is great, but it is no means the only content aggregation site out there and the creative commons licence is awesome but Web 2.0 isn't just about yanking other people's content either.

Now I will say that the Office of Educational Technology has never exactly been my favorite on the Allegheny College campus for the simple fact that they have never impressed me as overly up on a lot of technology. I worked for several organizations on campus during my years there and I was doing more interesting projects with many of them than this group ever came up with. In many ways the group created more burocracy which stopped technology from being adopted quickly, thus my skepticism that they truly will ever understand Web 2.0 and what it means in a larger context.