InnOL 01 - Web 2.0

Last friday, InnOL did our first COLUMN session (A learning and social platform for middle to upper management, i.e Principals and above) for the year centering the topic of New Media and Web 2.0. Jeff started the session off with the video above about the changes in the education landscape due to new trends in technology.

Raymond Lee (DD of IDA tech planning) kick started the event with a grand introduction to the world of new media. Lets see how much of the following is new to us? Especially in education. How many of the following tools do we really use?

1. Blogs
2. Wikis (Not just wikipedia but the whole wiki concept)
3. 2nd Life
4. Skype
5. http://www.earthsg.com/
6. Youtube/Crunchyroll/Veoh etc etc
7. Facebook
8. Google News
9. Google Docs
10. Digg

The list goes on... (I will try to add it from the slides he did on a later date)

So what is web 2.0? Essentially, its user-defined content. In the old web, we get our info fed to us from websites. Now, with the advent of web 2.0, we the users are defining the content we receive. Don't like my interpretation? Comment below and voila! New content! We decide what we want to see, what we want to hear etc etc.

Web 2.0 is also about the seperation of form from content. Its about the difficulty of categorizing data today. Today, we tag our data so that if I wanted to find this blog article again, I can search for my tags which I added below. We can't arrange information like a library in the web. Search engines have to be more fluid than say "Click News, Click Singapore, Click Education. Search..." The age of compartmentalization is over and soon libraries will feel the problem as it is harder to label books by an arbitrary dewey decimal system.



Another classic example is the difference between google and yahoo I saw on Digg a few months ago.
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The next guy who spoke was Cherian George. I found his comments on fragmentation most enlightening. In the new generation Y onwards, what are our common experiences? Our parents had common Kampong days. Generation X had rather similar educational experiences. Generation Y onwards, its the ipod generation. Your choice of music genre. Your choice of movie and gaming pleasure. As a public speaker, its harder to tap on the common experience of a crowd for analogies, context and even humour. This is an interesting phenomenon. As a teacher, I still see some possible angles to pitch context that all my students would have experience in.

1. Maplestory, Runescape, Gunbound
2. Mocca's "over there" is still a good joke to crack
3. Mr Brown was good last 2 years or so
4. Hi5, Barney, Power rangers etc
   

The engagement is still present for class context if pitched to the same age. I wonder how a Principal would cope trying to relate to a spread of teachers from Babyboomers to Gen Y.

Well... I guess this long post constitutes me to belong to the foggie's generation as put by Walter Lim (last speaker on Old Stories New Media). Walter is an avid blogger who champions Heritage in Singapore. I can see the uphill challenge he has trying to fuse the world of History with the world of IT. But he is in good company with educators around. I see hope in this journey and great potential for education in the generation of Web 2.0.