Personal Web
From Horizon.K12
2009 Short List
Time-to-Adoption: One year or Less
Time-to-Adoption: Two to Three YearsTime-to-Adoption: Four to Five Years
Critical ChallengesKey Trends |
Part of a trend that began with simple innovations like personalized start pages, RSS aggregation, and customizable widgets, the personal web is a term coined to represent a collection of technologies that confer the ability to reorganize, configure and manage online content rather than just viewing it. Using a growing set of free and simple tools and applications, it is easy to create customized, personal web-based environments that explicitly support one’s social, professional, learning and other activities via highly personalized windows to the networked world. Online material can be saved, tagged, categorized, and repurposed without difficulty and without any special knowledge of how web pages are put together. In fact, the underlying technology that supports the web has all but vanished for most users; all that is necessary is to know which tools to use, and any task — from creating and distributing class materials, to organizing groupwork and team tasks, to developing a library of resources that constantly refresh and update themselves — becomes point-and-click trivial.
As a result, students can create customized, personal web-based environments to support their social and academic activities using whatever tools they prefer. Tools that foster personal and social forms of learning and expression, though technically unrelated, work together seamlessly without any need for complicated setup, thanks to open applications programming interfaces (APIs) and easily integrated web feeds. Teachers can easily create online spaces for their classes that contain just the information they want their students to see, and students can create — and work in — online spaces that reflect their own interests and studies. The vast collection of content that makes up the web can be tamed, filtered, and organized, and anyone can publish as much or as little as they wish: the web has become personal.
Relevance for Teaching, Learning & Creative Expression
- The ease of online publishing gives students a place to voice their ideas, opinions, and research.
- Personal learning environments help students organize their own work as well as manage online references and resources.
- Personal publishing sites that offer printing services make it possible to create tangible products of student work, customized and inexpensive textbooks, and more.
Examples
- SmARThistory is an edited online art history resource to augment or replace traditional art history texts: http://smarthistory.org
- Studywiz Spark is a commercial product that allows teachers and students to create content-based learning spaces, accessible by computer or mobile device: http://studywizspark.com
- Eduglu is a content aggregator developed for educational use that includes a rating system: http://eduglu.learningparty.net
For Further Reading
Datagogies, Writing Spaces, and the Age of Peer Production
http://writersatwork.us/sites/Joe_Moxley/Articles/datagogies.pdf
(Joseph Moxley, Computers and Composition, Vol. 25, Issue 2, 2008; pp. 182-202.) This article (PDF, 676k) suggests that a different kind of teaching and learning takes place in learning communities that use peer-to-peer technologies.
The Evolution of Personal Publishing
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_evolution_of_personal_publ.php
(Alex Iskold, ReadWriteWeb, December 2007.) This post traces different categories of personal publishing – blogs, social networks, and microblogs – and posits that each appeals to a different type of writer and fills a particular purpose in social publishing.
A Widget Onto the Future
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/12/08/widgets
(Andy Guess, Inside Higher Ed, 8 December 2008.) This article describes widgets — tools for personalizing online information — and provides examples of some developed expressly for education.
