Web 2.0 in Business (Academia)
You can’t really get away from the fact that we’re now in the middle of Web 2.0. If you have no idea how this happened, then you’re not alone. By the nature of the name ‘2.0’ it implies that we’ve just had some amazing upgrade from Web 1.x … but the reality is it’s been far more subtle than that.
As described by InformationAge … “Web 2.0 resemble the Internet in the 1990s: it is over hyped, it is poorly understood and it is (without doubt) revolutionising business”. When they say Business, it is also a term inter-transferable with Academia. Web 2.0 has enabled the Internet to be used as a computing platform as opposed to a mechanism of transferring information … everything is now stored online.
Blogs, Wikis, Social Networking, Social Bookmarking, news feeds … the list is growing, and constantly evolving (as are the tools).
“The implications for business (academia) are numerous. For one, Web 2.0 changes the way customers (students/teachers) interact with one another and that demands a change in the way business (academia) communicate with their market.”
The impact of Web 2.0 is not stopping with the business-to-consumer, or teacher-to-learner, process. It is enabling organisations to interact directly with each other, as well as individuals within the organisations to interact with others.
Here at the University we use Blogs and Wikis to collaboratively work on research, on funding bids, on development of teaching resources, etc. The list goes on. We use them to work with the other Schools, sharing ideas and development plans, we share ideas on how to sort issues and problems that affect each School. We are using Web 2.0 to (hopefully) speed up the process of sharing, we are using Web 2.0 to increase our awareness of what is available ‘out there’.
Whether we agree with the name of Web 2.0 is neither here nor there, what is means is that we have to adapt to the Internet as it adapts to how people use it. We have to embrace the changes as it is the only way we will be able to engage with the students (who are growing up with this, it is not new to them, it’s the ‘norm’) and keep them engaged.
Ready for a radical perspective?
I come at this question from this perspective. Here, in the USA,a bout 4% of the K12 population has “opted-in” towards full participation in their education K12. These are the homeschoolers. They are pretty much using the web and computers and web2.0 just as fast as the facilities and technology become available.
The other 95% of the population have not opted in this direction. It’s still headline news in the US when computers are used in a meaningful way in schools. A terribly large percentage of the American population of teachers are hoping to retire before they get forced to learn to use a mouse or move into a more modern teaching methodology.
Just a thought. BTW, check out my latest site. I intended it to be a lot more 2.0ish than it has ended up. But that’s another story for another day. My spelling games website.