Horizon2007:Shortlist 1b
From Horizon Project
Time-to-Adoption: One Year or Less
User Content: It’s All About the Audience
Another family of Web 2.0 technologies—tagging and folksonomic tools, social bookmarking sites, and sites that make it easy to contribute ideas and content—is placing the power of media creation and distribution firmly into the hands of “the people formerly known as the audience” (Rosen, 2006).
Sites like Flickr, Odeo, YouTube, Google Video, and Ourmedia make it easy to find images, videos, and audio clips, but the real value of these sites lies in the way that users can classify, evaluate, and add to the content that is there. The emergence of collective wisdom through tagging allows interesting materials to quickly float to the top and be found. Naturally, these materials are not necessarily all related to learning or creativity, but the process does highlight what people are paying attention to. The challenge for us as educators is to figure out how to harness that power in a learning context.
Pervasive use of these tools is already in evidence among students, and this will only grow in the coming months. The social aspects of these audience-centered technologies, firmly established as powerful tools for creative expression, offer great potential to build community in the context of teaching and learning as well. Nonetheless, we face a significant challenge as we seek to marshal these techniques in the service of education, as this aspect of the new web turns the traditional view of what a website should be on its head.
Relevance for Teaching, Learning & Creative Expression
- Reframes the web with tools that can give voice to communities and encourage idea sharing
- Creates new forms of distribution for student work and new forms of publishing
- Allows (and encourages) shared responsibility for development of course resources, links, and materials
Examples
- PennTags allows the University of Pennsylvania Community to identify and organize resources by tagging: http://tags.library.upenn.edu/
- Uth TV (pronounced “youth TV”) is an online community of young people sharing original works of video, audio, and other media: http://www.uthtv.com/
For Further Reading
The People Formerly Known as the Audience (Jay Rosen, PressThink, June 27, 2006). "The people formerly known as the audience wish to inform media people of our existence, and of a shift in power that goes with the platform shift you’ve all heard about." http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/2006/06/27/ppl_frmr.html
Folksonomies: Tidying Up Tags? (Marieke Guy and Emma Tonkin, D-Lib Magazine, January 2006.) This paper looks at what makes folksonomies work. http:// www.dlib.org/dlib/january06/guy/01guy.html
Social Bookmarking: Mark It, Manage It, Share It (Mary Beth Lakin, American Council on Education Website, June 2, 2006). This brief article describes social bookmarking and suggests possible educational uses. http://www.acenet.edu/AM/Template.cfm?Section=Home&TEMPLATE=/CM/ContentDisplay.cfm&CONTENTID=16057
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Discussion
Add your thoughts, suggestions, examples to add here, and indicate who wrote it-- e.g. [Alan]
