Approximately 950 words
© Gary Clites 2009
Understanding Web 2.0
New technologies will push your students’ work off the PC and onto the ‘net
by Gary Clites
The wired world is rife with jargon, acronyms and metaphors forming a techno-language that often seems more about blocking the average user from understanding than illuminating anything. The term Web 2.0 is everywhere these days, and while the concepts implied within it have far reaching implications for scholastic journalism, it is ill understood by many of the teachers I encounter.
At its simplest, Web 2.0 refers to the assumed second generation of the Internet. Most experts trace the concept to the bursting of the dot-com bubble in late 2001 during which many early Internet entities went belly up, leading to changes in the way people looked at the ‘net. At a conference in 2004, Tim O’Reilly, president of O’Reilly Media, coined the term and, over time, it has come to be fairly accepted as a way to reference the new technologies that are affecting the way companies approach the Internet and the way people use it.
Web 1.0 gained popularity in the mid-1990’s with the entrance of the World Wide Web into the public consciousness. The first incarnation of the Web was all about interconnectivity. For the first time, a university could post its research online and people all over the world could access it; Mapquest could post maps and people could print them and go driving; Washingtonpost.com could upload articles from the Post and make them accessible to millions far from the nation’s capital.
A decade later, between the dot-com bubble burst and O’Reilly’s public announcement, two things happened in Internet technologies that would change the nature of the Web forever. The proliferation of various types of high speed Internet access to most end users both at home and in the workplace made the fast transfer of vast amounts of data available to most people. At the same time, revolutions in data storage allowed Internet computers to access and store enormous troves of data at relatively little cost. These factors combined to create a new Internet universe which could handle much more than just allowing people to access data.
What, then, is Web 2.0.? According to O’Reilly, the key is the development of the use of the web as a platform rather than as just a communications system. More and more, people are approaching the Internet not as a communications device, but rather as a supercomputer on which to do the things we used to do on our PC’s. Instead of writing a report using Word, we create it on Google Docs; Instead of printing out a survey at school, we create one on SurveyMonkey.com and run it online; instead of typing an e-mail and pressing send, we visit Facebook and connect with friends via their profiles and leave our message on their “Wall.”
In other words, we are no longer creating content and then posting it on the Internet as a static library of information. Rather, we are using technologies available on the Internet as tools to create, collaborate and share our content. This is not to say that the ‘net is no longer a library – in reality it is the largest repository of knowledge in history and grows more and more massive every day. Web 2.0 refers to the fact that we can now access and use all that information dynamically in new ways.
In the Web 2.0 world of the future, you will be able to buy a laptop with an operating system and not a single piece of software other than a web browser. Want to create a document? You can do it in GoogleDocs. Want to plan your newspaper schedule for the month in collaboration with student editors? Create an online Wiki. Want to edit a photo, go to Piknik.com (or any of the dozens of other free online photo editors) and get the job done. (Look for more on new online technologies in coming issues.)
Journalism teachers are already at the forefront of Web 2.0., even though many of us don’t know it. Some yearbooks have already moved to online layout using systems made available by their publishing companies. Newspaper staffs create and edit using online word processors and build websites using the tools available on ASNE’s HighSchoolJournalism.org. Broadcasting students create pages on SchoolTube.com and show their work to the world.
How does this affect us as educators? For starters, you may want to unload those shares you’ve bought in traditional PC-based software companies. Long term, the technologies available in Web 2.0 will continue to expand and more and more student and teacher work will move off the PC and onto the ‘net, though exactly what form that growth will take is hard to guess. Consider how unlikely things like Wikis and twittering seemed only a few years ago, and today they are a common part of many journalism programs.
Here, though, are a few key issues Web 2.0 will bring to journalism teachers:
• As more work moves onto the Web, software expenditures will probably fall.
• In a Web 2.0 world, security of both systems and student work will become more challenging.
• As students create more and more work on a worldwide network, safety concerns by school officials and parents will grow.
• A continually growing web-based world will likely continue to devalue printed text, even in the school media.
Like it or not, more and more of our student’s work will move out of our classrooms and onto the net. Web 2.0 will bring challenges for teachers, but long term it offers exciting opportunities of which communications educators are uniquely positioned to take advantage.