Learning 2.0: 2.0 Basics (part 1)
Friday, March 31st, 2006I have been speaking extensively this past couple of months on the subject of Learning 2.0. It is time to get our weblog here caught up with the ideas presented in my talks. So over the next couple of days I will be writing a series of posts on Learning 2.0. Today I'll start with a set of principles that I call 2.0 Basics. These are the key ideas in the 2.0 world, which I think are most salient for learning. They are:
- The network as platform
- The network as palette
- The social network
- RSS as the new language, and
- Aggregators as the new desktop
The network as platform: Rather than working alone inside of centralized applications users now access distributed web services that allows them to do things collaboratively. These services include social bookmarking services like del.icio.us, which allows users to independently upload and tag URLs to a server where they can be accessed and shared; and web software services like Basecamp where projects are managed using a web service as opposed to an application on the PC. Web services are easily interconnected through open standards and open application interfaces (APIs). Plugged together, these services can replace more rigid centralized applications and put their power in the hands of the users.
The network as palette: There is a paradigm shift underway where people go beyond reading the web to writing, podcasting, re-mixing, and publishing. With blogs and podcasting anybody can document and publish what they know. New kinds aggregators and directories (the podcast area of the iTunes music store is the most robust example of this) allow users to categorize and publish their work. So anybody can be an expert. But it goes further than that. People are free to publish, and the data they publish is then freed from centralized applications and re-organized and re-used and shared by web services that are designed to support specific business processes.
The social network: During the past few years, a group of web services shifted from static island-like sites to dynamic connective services. Blogs, wikis, trackback, podcasting, videoblogs, and social networking tools like MySpace and Facebook have been organized under the term “social software.” All of these new services are about links, micro-content, and metadata. They are about interconnecting sets of ideas and people. Blogs are about posts, not pages. These posts or items help organize Web content into clean, crisp chunks (known as items) that have vital metadata associated with them, like the date of publication, authorship, categories and tags. Linking among posts is the connective tissue that makes the web social. Folksonomies–user-defined and generated taxonomies–organize links into social networks. New search services enable mining of these new networks.
RSS as the lingua franca: I n the web 2.0 model, you find millions of publishers and thousands of “web services” scanning each new piece of information published. According to the author Steven Johnson, “Information in this new model is analyzed, repackaged, digested, and passed on down to the next link in the chain. It flows.”2 This new information ecology is much more likely to lead to innovation as old problems and new ideas collide. Innovation is recombinant and innovators do their best work bringing together old problems and new solutions, existing technologies and unexpected applications, or different types of technology. The process of re-combination is popularly known by the term “mash-up.” Users with a modest amount of technical skills can determine needs, come up with creative solutions, and then quickly build the required combinations of tools themselves. RSS is important because it is facilitating the development the web 2.0 information ecosystem. RSS has become the language of syndication of content between the all systems on the web. An RSS aggregator or news aggregator will most likely become the new user interface to the Intranet. An aggregator is a type of software that retrieves syndicated web content that is supplied in the form of a web feed (RSS, Atom and other XML formats), that is published by weblogs, podcasts, video blogs, and mainstream mass media websites. The aggregator provides a consolidated view of content in a single browser display or desktop application. RSS is the new pathway for information flow on the web. Users now have better control over what reaches them and how it arrives.
The aggregator as the new desktop: this topic is going to needs its own full post, so I'll reserve it for part 2 of this series of posts.
