The researchers’ perspective - Charles Crook

Notes:
Web 2.0 = ‘many-to-many’ rather than being transmitted from one to many


The first is the growth in the sheer number of internet users, which we term an increase in engagement.


This increased engagement arises from and stimulates a potent mix of technical developments, notably growth in bandwidth, ubiquity, mobility, and capacity for data storage.


Second, the internet allows the virtualisation of exchange practices.


The ease with which digital products can be upgraded has encouraged a perpetual beta attitude towards design, where products and practices are inherently evolving, rather than comfortably finished.


The social networking sites, famously Facebook and MySpace, can be seen as elaborations of this format into more tightly-knit and manageable communities of reflective users.


The blog tradition is personal and diary-like.


The wiki shares a quality of ‘perpetual beta’ with the blog but it allows other users an equable right to edit and develop content in a common space. Thus it is well-suited to the collaborative building of specialist knowledge.


collaboration = classroom communities


the term ‘literacy’ now has to be stretched to admit other forms of representational fluency than those associated with the printed word.

(a) What does Crook mean by the ‘virtualisation of exchange practices’? (p.6)

Under Web2.0 the traditional ways of sharing personal effects such as photos, messages, music, and so on have been added to by virtual methods online. Add to this the exchange of money for goods online and the traditional methods of meeting, postal services, going to the shops have all been virtualised. You still need the physical action of having online purchases delivered however - you might even have to open the door and sign for it!

(b) Would you agree that the learning dimensions that Crook sets out as characteristic of Web 2.0 can be grouped as either more social or more cognitive? (p.9)

Yes, but only in the sense that he has 'managed' to broadly bracket the activities into four areas, there will naturally be some cross-over between the disciplines.