Terry’s Blog

A colleague at work drew my attention to this article, Web 2.0, published in November this year by Paul Graham. I have read a lot about Web 2.0 in recent months and have always been rather confused about what it is. I came to the conclusion it is something about working collaboratively on the Web using web-based ’social software’. However, I think I am a bit clearer on this now thanks to this article. There is a great deal in it that I found interesting but a couple of things in particular caught my attention.

Paul Graham focuses on two main aspects of Web 2.0 (a name he hates) - the development of web based applications and the notion that it signifies a welcome and belated development towards what he considers to be the intrinsic nature of the web; its interactive, ‘community’ and democratic potential. Both these aspects of the web are linked in his comments on Wikipedia, for example. He says: “Experts have given Wikipedia middling reviews, but they miss the critical point: it’s good enough. And it’s free, which means people actually read it. On the web, articles you have to pay for might as well not exist. Even if you were willing to pay to read them yourself, you can’t link to them. They’re not part of the conversation”. What immediately struck me here was his use of the word ‘conversation’. It is because Wikipedia is subject to a community of users and is criticised and developed through communication between interested and engaged users that it works as well as it does. The role of the community and their conversation is central.

This links to another issue alluded to by the article, the issue of quality, given the masses of junk on the web. The suggestion is that the ‘democratic’ nature of the web makes the community of users the best evaluator of web content. I first came across this idea while reading George Siemens’ essays, blog posts and his Elgg podcast on his theory of ‘connectivism’. This is based on the notion that an interactive community of practitioners in a particular sphere, say e-learning, collectively read, evaluate, use and refer to and disseminate what they find to be useful and of value on the web. These resources and reflections upon them are integrated into the community’s conversation, ideas are tested, criticised and developed and reputations for being a reliable source and interesting commentator/contributor are built. George Siemens’ offered this as one of the reasons he is not worried about his or other writings he draws upon not having been passed through the process of a peer reviewed journal. He argues that the ‘community’ review exposes the whole review process to readers and is often as useful, or more so, a resource as is the article in question. It exposes the ‘knowledge making process’ and not just some anonymously authorised version of the content, which some months later, if ever, gets a published comment and then even later perhaps a reply from the original author.

The other section of the article I found suggestive is the account of why Excite, an early product of the original dot.com boom, failed. According to Joe Kraus, a co-founder of Excite, the problem was largely the use of inappropriate business models. “Excite really never got the business model right at all. We fell into the classic problem of how when a new medium comes out it adopts the practices, the content, the business models of the old medium [...] which fails, and then the more appropriate models get figured out.” This again reminded me very much of something else George Siemens has claimed, that a great deal of the e-learning practice and ‘instructional design’ that has attempted to use the new web technologies have largely failed because they have been based upon older pedagogies and models for teaching and learning. The problem has been that we have failed to recognise and develop the different pedagogies and models of learning that are naturally facilitated by new forms of collaborative working and the ’social’ aspects of social software.

My source for George’s ideas is his Elgg podcast. At the time I made some Notes on George Siemens’ Elggradio podcast that cover in more detail the points above.

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