Reading through the Reader 1 was an utter journey and for me and personally, an eye opening experience. My understanding of what now has become the future generation of creators. Everyone using the Web 2.0 has gained a voice, an equality amongst internet users and providers.
To start with, I was clueless as to what Web 2.0 means, it sounds like something alien almost, but in fact the majority of us know exactly what it is! As it states in the reader "Web 2.0 refers to a second generation of web based communities. This includes social networking sites (like Facebook and Twitter)". Straight away it clicked, how many of us use social networking sites such as Facebook and twitter? Even my younger cousin of 10 has Facebook! She therefore, is part of the 2.0 community!
I particularly paid attention to the line "Web 2.0 provides the opportunity for the reader and creator to interact and more importantly, for reader to become the creator". It drew my attention as I liked the use of the word creator, as the reader continues I began to understand the role of a Web 2.0 user, as quite correctly, we are creators!
The accessibility of Web 2.0 is so easy, as it states "anywhere in the world" and also "the interface is usually user friendly, simple to use and quick to load" indeed so, if anyone has a Internet provider, we can become these creators. We begin feel a sense of importance, and a role model like status almost, as it states in the reader "the users add content to the site, and the more the users access the site and add data the better the site becomes".
We need to embrace this new generation of technology, it drew my attention in O'reilly's article why some people decry it as a 'meaningless marketing buzzword, and others accepting it as new convention wisdom". This is true that we all need to ACCEPT this revolution. Again the understanding is that we have now moved on from the 90s notion that the web was about publishing, not participation, that advertisers, not consumers, ought to call the shots, that size mattered and that the Internet was increasingly being dominated by the top websites.
I could relate to a particular aspect of O'reilly's article, where he stated "the more popular the file, in fact, the faster it can be served, as there are more users providing bandwidth and fragments of the complete file'. The key Web 2.0 principle advocates "the service automatically gets better the more people use it". I can relate this to my own form of advertising, I now purposely use Facebook as a platform for advertising my own dance classes and inspirations. I constantly update my page with all aspects of dance and arts. I link to be stimulated and stimulate others, it's a whole sharing network amongst us. I post videos up, likewise I watch and comment on others. It works as almost a back and forward platform, continually updating others and improving all our experience and depth of knowledge. As the reader goes on to say "in Web 2.0, the user can collaborate, comment, critique, share and remix information and technological communications".
Another point raised in the reader is "when working on any public forum it would be good to consider your own professional reputation needs". I can relate this to dance and entertainment companies purposely looking at your pages to seek information about you as a person. This is vital to your career as a dancer, all your information you choose to be seen on the sites is committing yourself to accepting that the information can be accessed anywhere, from anyone. This fits in nicely with the ethical considerations. As it states in the reader, it's important to the "professionals" this is what we're becoming, we have to be cautious, committed and responsible for what, where and how were presenting ourselves and the content at which were exploiting.
Whether we have realised it or not yet, users of the Web 2.0 community are continually gaining knowledge, engaging responsibility and becoming professionals. This is central to our learning. It is now being used across many courses, more specific to higher education, and most valuable to it's students. It strikes me that Web 2.0 is such an advance in technology and such a genius revolution, that we are lucky to have these tools so accessible and important to our learning.
No comments:
Post a Comment