A Report on Web 2.0 and its Potential Uses
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NOVEMBER 28, 2007—For a definition of Web 2.0, the obvious place to look is on one of the best examples of a Web 2.0 site: Wikipedia. Wikipedia cites Stephen Fry as saying that the key feature of Web 2.0 sites is the "reciprocity between the user and the provider is what’s emphasized.... [P]eople can upload as well as download." (Wikipedia 2007)
One of the primary features of Web 2.0 is multi-directional communication (Alexander 2006). Web 2.0 sites often include two-way and multi-way communication by multiple authors of content instead of the one-way broadcast communication common to web sites in the 1990s. Web 2.0 sites include blogs, discussion threads, links to other blog entries, RSS feeds, collaboratively-written web pages (often in the form of wikis), and user-uploadable content with tagging by people other than the content creator (e.g. YouTube, Flickr).
Great web sites before Web 2.0 were primarily great because of their content. There are still great web sites that are broadcast-only, with great content, but all great Web 2.0 sites involve content plus community, including multi-directional communication of some sort. The content is sometimes generated by a single person or a group, but often it is generated by crowds of people, the visitors to and users of the web site.
Weblogs have been around since 1994, when they were not yet an example of Web 2.0, but they exploded in popularity in the early 2000s and added community features, making them more Web-2.0-like (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog for a history). Many Web 2.0 sites and services incorporate blogging and associated RSS feeds in their efforts to build community.
In a keynote speech at the ACM SIGUCCS Computer Services Management Symposium in 2007, Bryan Alexander of NITLE (many ideas in this report are borrowed from Alexander’s thorough analysis of Web 2.0 in education) quoted Jyri Engesrom on social networks and Web 2.0: "The fallacy is to think that social networks are just made up of people. They’re not; social networks consist of people who are connected by a shared object" (Alexander 2007). In education this connection via a shared object is the key, and it’s also the easy part. Students are continually asked to create designs, do research, write papers, or come up with proposed solutions to a policy problem. Each of these assignments can easily become a shared object on which the students work and around which a network can be constructed. A group of shared objects can serve as the hub of a larger network that comprises a class, a curriculum, a department, a school, or a university.
The shared object can also be a person, or a person’s academic work. The most common contemporary example of people as shared objects occurs in Facebook and similar sites, but eportfolios are clear examples of people and people’s work as shared objects in academia.
People often share academic and non-academic interests, work on group projects, and share other common aspects of participating in an academic setting. These shared traits and interests can link people together in a social network.
The Web 2.0 label is also sometimes applied to multi-player on-line games (e.g. World of Warcraft) and to mashups, the combination of sets of digital information to create a new digital work. I do not address either of these types of in this report, because they are not necessarily web-based or community-oriented.
For the remainder of this paper, Prepared by Chris Jones, A&AA Director of Computing Services, please see (http://aaa.uoregon.edu/computing/downloads/pdf/Web_2.0_white_paper_200711.pdf)