Some time ago, I wrote about the MacArthur Foundation’s intent to investigate the participatory web. After some preparatory work, the Foundation offered a call for grant proposals and now has announced the recipients. Andy Carvin offers a nice summary of some of the awards and includes links to some of the projects.
An item that caught my attention was a course offered by Stanford’s Howard Rheingold on virtual communities ( see course syllabus). Carvin describes the course as an
initiative by online community pioneer Howard Rheingold will develop an online community for teachers and students to collaborate and contribute ideas for teaching and learning about the psychological, interpersonal, and social issues related to participatory media.
If educational implications of the participatory web interest you, take a look at the reading list contained within the syllabus.
Many, including those in the education sector who take advantage of free services, have benefited from the many free Web 2.0 resources that are available at no cost. Some analysts are now predicting that a major funding source for such ventures, advertising, may be reaching a saturation point. As more and more ventures are launched, the array of services may reach the point at which very few generate enough funding to keep going. Consumers may follow new developments leaving existing services without the attention to generate necessary revenue.
The options at present appear to be advertising or creating a service that will be purchased by Google/Yahoo/Microsoft. Perhaps 2008 will surface a new option.
BusinessWeek (Sept. 5) has a recent article commenting on new technology applications in K-12 environments. Use of “2.0” is beginning to annoy me. I am thinking it is a personal problem – I have a way of using the term in reference to technology applications and it is sometimes difficult mapping this personal understanding on the way the term is applied in another context. Maybe if this is a general reaction we should recognize that the term has no meaning and move on.
Anyway – the article contains some project descriptions that were interesting and new to me. Take a look.
There is a section that deals with safety and educational value. The topic is consistent with the way I think about “2.0” issues, but the discussion did not seem connected with the examples used in the rest of the article. I wonder if this is a journalistic technique – throw the odds and ends in at the end. I have one complaint about this section. There is a statement here I would like to verify:
About 1 in 5 children online is sexually solicited, according to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, which has created www.netsmartz.org to teach children, parents, and educators about online safety.
While the examples in the article are supported by links, the statements in the section on Safety and Educational value are not. I have read several studies from the Center for Missing and Exploited Children (see final comment) and know the organization has much more to say. What is said or not said makes a great difference in the context of the news item. For example, when students encounter online solicitation, where are they connecting from? If the connection is nearly always from homes, what might this say about the role of the schools? Perhaps social networking experiences and discussions related to social networking need to be emphasized in schools so that students are prepared for the encounters they might experience when mom is not looking.
Grabe summary of recent Missing and Exploited Children survey. Grabe summary of recent report from the National School Boards Association.
I find that I read or listen to a wide variety of resources in order to shape my ideas regarding future applications of technology in education. The World is Flat, The Social Life of Information, Wisdom of Crowds, The Long Tail, etc. and other books have provided insights. I do a similar thing with people. Anyone interested in “participatory” web applications has probably read the comments of Tim O’Reilly on Web 2.0.
Sometimes, what you would like, is to have the individuals responsible for these perspectives to comment more directly on the application of such ideas for education. Steve Hargadon offers an interview with Tim O’Reilly in which he asks O’Reilly to do just that. The podcast is worth a listen.
As most know by now, the Time Person of the year is YOU. You in the Time perspective refers to OUR involvement in the participatory net (Web 2.0).
I do not typically read Time online so I am not familiar with their conventions for offering magazine content online. When I first tried some days ago, the articles were not available, but now it appears that most articles can be read without purchasing the paper version. This is worth a look – not because any of the articles concern educational topics, but because the discussion of Web 2.0 topics is useful to those interested in general Internet use.
The article I found most useful was a short piece by Jeff Howe (I could not find this article online). I tend to be attracted to useful ways of describing or categorizing complete phenomena. In keeping with the theme of YOU as person of the year, Mr. Howe described Web 2.0 as:
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