Web 2.0 is the ability to be "anywhere virtually" or "virtually anywhere." It is linking people. Web 2.0 makes us active participants in sharing, trading and collaborating online. Web 2.0 is a
collection of tools that allow all this to happen:
The Machine is Us
Flikr, Google Docs, Google Groups, YouTube, Blogger, Edmodo and many, many, many more! It is the ability to organize the data anyway I want to and share with others if I want to. Will Richardson says it is "connective writing–connective reading. It is not just a passive piece of paper that I read and file or throw away, it begs to be made my own in some way. Web 2.0 is rich and user friendly according to Wikipedia, another Web 2.0 tool.
- Blog born every half a second.
- 100,000,000,000 times a day a Webpage is clicked.
- Things are done in Real Time.
- What we do should be available to others, with measure.
- 2,630 links to Web 2.0 tools on Go2Web2o
The video, "The Machine is Us" really brought home to me how flexible the Web can be for anyone. Text, pictures–anything that can be read, written, drawn, designed, created can be put on the web. This is what Web 2.0 is partly about for me.
One of the main components of Web 2.0 is the ability to collaborate with anyone, anywhere, anytime. For education this means we have to change, just as Will Richardson says. I am not going to require my students to only turn work in with paper and pencil but allow them to use any of the Web 2.0 tools that we might be currently using.
The one we are exploring right now is Edmodo–and it has a turn in assignment place as well as an online grading function. How this will all be used in education is constantly being rethought, but that is what Web 2.0 is all about.
