Proposition: The house believes that social networking technologies will bring large [positive] changes to educational methods, in and out of the classroom. So opens this week’s debate in the ongoing series at Economist.com. I find myself in substantial agreement with both Ewan McIntosh’s pro position, and with Michael Bugeja’s con position. The two men have
The old saw suggests that if the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. We’re seeing a lot of that in the social software space. Apparently, now that every corporate executive has a kid on Facebook, more and more companies in the Web2.0, social software space feel the need to
There’s a fascinating formal debate taking place on The Economist site this week. The proposition put forward is: This house believes that the continuing introduction of new technologies and new media adds little to the quality of most education. Speaking to the pro side is Sir John Daniel, President and Chief Executive Officer of The
If the web-displayed email list is the oldest form of Web2.0 technology, the message board is probably the second-most venerable form of the read-write web. For many web denizens, the message board is their first experience with publishing their words in a world-readable place. And though some would like to think this technology too “last
Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach posted a very thorough round-up of current thinking in The Art of Building Virtual Communities over on the TechLearning blog. If you haven’t read it, do. I learned of it from industry veteran Howard Rheingold. I’ve found over the years that when Howard says something is worth checking out, I’ll be sorry to
The blogs are alive with Knowledge Management talk this week. Apparently, June is KM conference time. As a professional who has spent most of my career developing technical tools to facilitate communities of practice and training, I think I can reasonably refer to my work as facilitating the management of knowledge. Mostly, I’ve been all
I’m becoming a big fan of the commoncraft show, where Lee and Sachi LeFever posts their brilliant introductions to Web 2.0 elements. His low-tech representations of the workings of RSS and most recently, Wikis, using a white board, marker, and cut-outs of screen elements, somehow seem so much friendlier than the screencam approaches we’ve all
Last week, Jay Cross declared something we’ve thought true for a long time: Conversations are a better way to learn than reading blog entries, so I’m remapping my site [to] make it easier to learn from. One of the most active conversations in Jay’s new Ning-based Internet Time Community is “How to start a community?”
Sherry Turkle writes in Forbes this week about the tradeoffs incurred in our technologically-facilitated multi-tasking approach to the world. She observes: The self that grows up with multitasking and rapid response measures success by calls made, e-mails answered and messages responded to. Self-esteem is calibrated by what the technology proposes, by what it makes easy.
Jacqui Cheng over at Ars Technica notes that voyeurism still rules the web 2.0 world. She refers to a speech this week by Hitwise analyst Bill Tancer at the Web 2.0 expo in San Francisco: According to the report, only 0.16 percent of YouTube’s total traffic is made up of users who upload videos. Similarly,