Chapter 1

I was not terribly impressed by this chapter. I didn't find the ideas coherent, so this is more musings about what I've learned about the idea of Web 2.0, than about the chapter.

As I tell my son, I aspire to be a geek and so I was a little surprised this summer when I first heard of Web 2.0 and didn’t know what it was. I was even more concerned when I learned it was a concept and not a piece of software. We covered some of the Web 2.0 tools in the last class I took which made me start looking into Web 2.0 before this class started.

I went straight to Tim O’Reilly, the person who coined the phrase. I read his article http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html?page=1 that explained about his view of Web 2.0 and watched a couple of clips from his Web 2.0 conferences. It was indeed enlightening. Terms and phrases like perpetual betas, the long tail, services not software, users as codevelopers and collective intelligence were described in detail. As he is a businessman, he looked at it from a different angle than educators might look at it. After all if we use collective intelligence on open source software, how does one make money?

Another term I’ve heard repeatedly since beginning to read about Web 2.0 was flat, flatten, or flatteners. Our text cites Friedman who says the world is becoming flat. He says there are three flatteners and it appears that technology is one of the flatteners. Dr. Templar mentioned that there were some Atomic Learning tutorials on Web 2.0. I watched them and the teacher used the term “flat classroom” rather than a Web 2.0 classroom. She demonstrated many Web 2.0 tools, but continually referred to them as part of a “flat classroom.”

As I have learned about Web 2.0, I am delighted that this can be used to our benefit. As there is diminishing funding for traditional software purchased in public housing computer labs, it is great to note that there are open source and online resources that won’t cost $300/computer to install. Web 2.0 can be a great flattener for us. If we have a computer donated to give to a low income family, it was virtually impossible to find ways to purchase Office Suite or even WordPerfect. As online applications such as Google become more used, they will be more readily accepted making the world just a little bit flatter.

The idea of making your users codevelopers is a great resource that benefits all of us. I am one of those 77% of online consumers cited in the text on page 15 who read reviews and, if they seem valid, use them, both in my personal and professional life. If there are no reviews, I tend to move to a product that has a review. So a company's users not only provide feedback (hopefully good) for other customers, but, if a company is paying attention, the feedback will help them develop better, more useful products or customer service. This is among the simplest of examples.

What about the sites that use open source code? Paint.net or Gimp gets a little better every time someone writes code to create an effect or fix a problem.

However, as I read this book and discussed these same philosophies in the last class, I began wondering how these new technologies would affect children. Frequently, I hear stores about how kids can’t sit still, that attention spans are becoming shorter, that kids want to be entertained by school work. Dr. Templar said that more and more children come to school as visual learners, with very few having aural learning skills.

I was appalled to read in the Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms that NetDay News reported that the fastest growing segment of the population accessing the internet is preschoolers. Thankfully there is no mention that we’ve put them in front of computers to do “drill and kill” exercises, but someone could. I suspect that it’s becoming the preferred babysitter when a parent chooses between TV and computer. I would much rather see a 2-4 year old free to explore his world with all of his senses than sit in front of a flat screen to count teddy bears or match colors or whatever else we might think of.

As I was pondering this, the Atlantic Monthly published an article entitled, “Does Google Make Us Stupid?” http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google Again, the article talks anecdotally about how people feel that they have less concentration for in-depth learning. The author, Nicholas Carr, does a good job of weaving in the various advances society has made with media and the adverse impact that was always foretold, with the tale of the computer and internet. I know I’m very happy that Guttenberg made the printing press while those of that day foresaw that our minds would be weakened.

With all that being said, I believe the internet is here to stay and that we must adapt ourselves and our educational system to a medium that is flattening the world.


By the way, one of the things in this chapter that irritated me…
On page 12, the book cites a study (link broken) that says the U.S. is #20 in the world for broadband penetration (I wasn’t really sure whether they meant the land or the people). I thought it was very interesting that the countries mentioned, other than the U.S., had very small land masses and had fairly small populations. Just for kicks I went to wikipedia:

South Korea (#1 in study) has 38,022 sq miles with 35 million. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square_kilometre & http://www.trivia-library.com/a/south-korea-location-history-size-population-and-government.htm
(I didn’t want to do the conversion of square kilometers to square miles.)

US (#20 in study) has 3.79 million sq miles with approximately 300+ million people. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States

If you figure out the 44% of the country that the US has completed, it would cover about 43 South Koreas and/or almost 4 times their population.