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Web2.0 - What Does it Mean to Us?

This short video demonstrates how the web has been transformed into a place where we, the users, are able to create, manipulate and organize the millions of pages of content that exist online. We are able to communicate with people who are sitting next to us, or with those who are sitting across the world. We are able to share our words, our pictures, our videos with anyone and everyone. We can read about what's happening in the world, in our neighborhoods within minutes of when events occur. Web 2.0 has changed our economy, our politics, and our social lives. It has changed the way we get our news, the way we choose a movie, a restaurant or hotel and even the way we buy our music. It is slowly, but surely, changing the way we educate our children. What kind tool will Web2.0 be for you? How will you use it to work with one another, to gather and organize information, to research, to communicate, to meet people and to learn about the world?

When I first started using the Internet about 12 years ago, it was a place where information was added to the web by developers and web designers and read by the users. The general public was only a viewer of web content. The information was not always current, and it could not be manipulated or organized like it can be today. If we wanted to hold onto it we printed it. I had one computer in the 5th grade class that I was teaching, and I was very excited about the fact that the World Book Encyclopedia was on a CD for us to use; not the Internet, just a CD. That means, unlike the online encyclopedias we are accustomed to today, the information was not dynamic; it was only updated as often as the company decided to release a new edition. The information we access today is constantly changing; it is not created only by web developers, but by everyday people. Not only do we have to find ways to organize the content, but we have to weed through the millions of pages and determine which content is reliable and which should be disregarded as misinformation. How will you do that? We must pay careful attention to who creates the content we read, what is their motivation, what is their expertise? We must think about who is viewing the content that we create. How will our message be perceived? How will we be perceived based on the content we add? How will our privacy be affected?
What do you need to know to be able to manage the content of the web? What role will Web2.0 play in your learning? What kind of presence will you be online?

Way back in 1995 when the World Wide Web became a household phenomenon there was the fear that it would create a world of isolation. Lone users in dark rooms cut off from society. People would stop communicating preferring, instead, to consume information with no outlet. Fortunately, with the development of Web 2.0, just the opposite has happened; the blinds have been raised, lights turned on and doors opened when we started to actively participate instead of just consume. Web 2.0 is a collection of tools and computer languages that allow anyone with an internet connection the ability to easily create and share information. How does this happen? The development of XML (Extensible Markup Language) and CSS (Cascading Stylesheets) removed the content from the form. For instance, in HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) you would tell the computer to create a table (form) and what to put into that table (content). Blogs and wikis and YouTube and Flickr are built using XML and CSS. Together they make the web page readable and pretty. When you use a blog or wiki or YouTube or Flickr you need only focus on creating or uploading the content. This makes it very easy for anyone with internet access to add new information to the web.

So what does Web 2.0 mean? It means "We are the Web". How many of you upload pictures to Flickr or Picassa? Or video to YouTube? If you have, then you are the web. Anyone ever edited a Wikipedia entry or created one of your own? If yes, then you are the web. Are there problems with Web 2.0? Are we all experts? Are we all unbiased? Do we have the most current data? No, no, and no. Even though we have a greater ability to participate and share online we are still consumers of information. Can Web 2.0 help us be better consumers of information? How?