1. How relevant are Web 2.0 apps and tools to me as an educator?
Increasingly Web 2.0 apps and tools are not just relevant to me as an educator - they are starting to seem ever more central. Recently after years of using Gmail, and to a lesser extent, Google Documents, I've started to use Google Calendar and its been a revelation for me! I've always struggled with calendars (kind of thinking: "What's the point - I know what I'm doing"). But as I've started to take on more leadership roles in education (and have one a principal position starting next year) I now see the benefits of being able to, for example, share and collaborate with other people, have them interrogate and add to the data and tasks of my schedule. Despite having used Outlook, Google Calendar just feels like a slam-dunk for me.
Why? Well because I can see how this tool could be vital for me to keep in touch with other people - and adding users to my schedule is only as far away as an invitation - no need for people to give up their work habits, or download new software. Plus Web 2.0 makes my schedule into an application in its own right.
2. What have been the benefits of doing this course?
As an educator I have been given food for thought and an awareness of is now and what can be done. These are powerful inducements for me to start to think of new ways to implement and update my practice and they provide a basis for me to be informed about the practice of others and aware of 'new ways' of delivering curriculum, sharing information, being informed and creating / sustaining communities based on the free flow and commonly shared ideas of myself and the people I work with - either a teacher to student or peer to peer.
3. Will the rise of Web 2.0, 3? mean the demise of informed expertise?
I grew up in a very different access-to-information world. I look back now - even to as short a time ago as the 1980's / early 1990's and I see a very different world of information. Information was certainly much harder to come by. I remember doing my first degree and sitting in the lecture theatre and listening to a lecture about Epicurus, then reading the photocopied readings (2) and having a look in the library and eventually finding some 40 year old book that had two relevant pages that I assumed were relevant (Epicurus is a lot tougher than he sounds). I just Googled Epicurus (actually Google kindly offered me a spelling correction) and got 3,480,000
hits! Wow, how easy is that?
Now because I've actually done the hard spade work, as it were, over many years, I have a fair
ability to interpret those hits. But what about future things I learn about? What about people that
follow me who have less experiencing spending a long to time to understand a little fine point?
Well I don't know about them.
The heady scent of revolution is in the air and there is a sense that finally the People have pushed beyond the velvet rope shielding the cultural elites, who should get out of the way and stop spoiling the party for those people who get it.
It's a very seductive proposition. Now we can all show off our talents – something that has been denied us for so long by the cultural gatekeepers. (And there's no shortage of people out there who think their genius has gone unrecognised only because of the unfair system. Unfortunately, they are mostly wildly deluded – try sitting through an early round of Australian Idol or reading most self-published novels). The argument is that culture has been liberated and democratised, allowing those outside the mandated mainstream to have their say.
Of course there are many referred, valid sources of information out there - heck alot is being
mashed, mushed, collaborated on, shared, remade and wiki'd as I write this (poorly edited,
symptomatic piece). I can't help wondering in age where the barriers to self-publishing are
effectively made irrelevant what will become of informed opinion. As the same SMH article
noted, it's financially difficult to keep publishing when nobody's (or too few) are buying:
May 16, 2009: The Tucson Citizen, Arizona's oldest daily newspaper, produces its last edition after 138 years. In its heyday, the Citizen had a circulation of about 60,000. That number had dwindled to 17,000 by the time its owners, Gannett, pulled the plug. The publisher, Jennifer Boice, pens an emotional open letter in that final edition. "It has been an honour to be a part of the community, invited daily into your homes . . . " she wrote. "Newspapers don't just close, they die. And death is personal."
Perhaps the signs are already here:
(CNN) -- Media tycoon Rupert Murdoch expects News Corporation-owned newspaper Web sites to start charging users for access within a year in a move which analysts say could radically shake-up the culture of freely available content.
So probably not. Web 2.0 won't mean the demise of informed expertise. It will be challenged by the idea of what free is worth, I imagine. This is certainly a question that runs around my head a lot. For all of the collaborative sharing that we do - what do we really know as opposed to agree on? I like the Socratic position "I know that I know nothing." Now how do I collaborate with that? :)
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