Smelly Knowledge

There’s alot going on in the early-adopter-web-development-community right now, and like many others (e.g., Will Richardson, Alan Levine, Brian Lamb, and David Warlick) I believe that the impact of these new technologies — and the new mindset — will (eventually) have a pretty profound impact on the field of education and the business of learning. This emerging philosophy and collection of features — termed as Web 2.0 — can be exemplified in tools such as Flickr, del.icio.us, Technorati, Furl, Rojo, the Mozilla Firefox Greasemonkey extension, and many others. There are some very nice write-ups on the topic, such as Wikipedia’s “Web 2.0” entry, Richard MacManus’ Web as Platform Mash-ups entry on his Read/Write Web blog, and Thomas Vander Wal’s “Designing for the Personal InfoCloud”. They do a much better job of describing this stuff than I would, but here are some of the highlights:

• An emphasis on the social “human” sharing of information;
• Information convergence, which means that data can be passed from one application or tool to another;
• A high degree of customizability, the cut-and-paste culture at its best;
• Bottom-up development, not top-down.

Again, look through some of the above write-ups, because they do it better than I do. However, I do believe that Peter Merholz said it best: “The point isn’t the features, it’s the underlying philosophy of relinquishing control” (hmmm… sounds like many of the edtech conversations and presentations I’ve heard, such as the ol’ “Guide on the Side vs. Sage on the Stage” discussion).

RSS has been the recent buzz in the educational blogosphere, and it is a very useful and effective tool for managing the flow of information (once RSS itself as a concept is understood — for an academic paper on the evolution of the digital divide concept, see “Reconceptualizing the Digital Divide”). However, RSS is just on tool in the Web 2.0 toolbox — and there are many. The idea of the “perpetual beta” is a daunting one, as new features pop up often unannounced, allowing for new uses. This kind of technology development requires time to play and experiment, which as we all know, teachers are quite short on. As a result, frustration levels are likely to rise and a reactionary response will possibly occur, just as it always has when trying to change large complex systems and behaviors such as the teaching profession. Even my wife, who I would classify as relatively technologically savvy, has been fed up with my attempts to introduce to her the affordances of web 2.0 (notably RSS). It will just take time….

Later, I hope to document a use case or so on using the web 2.0 philosophy and technologies to encourage the learning process.