Web 2.0 and Emergent Multiliteracies

Abstract

Students are, increasingly, digital content producers, and participate extensively in evolving online social networks. The emergence of the former represents subtle changes in students' experience of images, audience, copyright, ownership of learning, and technology. Experiencing the latter places students in an awkward position in terms of pre-Web conceptions of social space, and especially concerning privacy and expression in a highly visual environment. This article considers how pedagogies confront emergent Web 2.0 habits, and situates them in the context of other architectures to represent very different models for information architecture, intellectual property, software development, gaming, and learning.

Notes

¹One image is actually moving, a shot of the main female character breathing, several seconds long.

²A blog is a Web site made up of many short content chunks, called posts, arranged in reverse chronological order. I read the blog Web through Bloglines, an RSS reader. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, an easy way of reading and aggregating information from news feeds, blogs, or other updated sources.

³ Technorati searches the Web for blogs, referred to as the blogosphere.

⁴Starting with http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=3547 and ending with http://infocult.typepad.com/infocult/2007/01/la_jete_on_yout.html

⁵Web 3.0 sometimes refers to the application of the semantic Web. It is Sir Tim Berners-Lee's recommendation for improved Web page metadata. Web 3d describes using virtual environments, like Second Life, to experience the Web.

⁶See Howard Rheingold's description, http://www.rheingold.com/texts/tft/7.html

⁷Wikis are Web pages that any user can edit in their browser. Podcasts are digital audio files, usually in a series, which people can download through various applications. Videoblogs are blogs that include movies as content.

⁸ http://www.flickr.com/. Flickr's success has spawned a series of social image services, such as PhotoBucket and 23hq.

⁹Blog software automatically renders each post—and each comment—as a separate page. The user is responsible only for the content chunk, the blog post, located within, but not constituting, the majority of content of that page.

¹⁰ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bryanalexander/349743048/

¹¹Screenshot may be accessed at: http://www.pulsethebook.com/index.php

¹²In Europe often referred to a Virtual Learning Environment, or VLE.

¹³For example, Middlebury College's history department's recent and widely discussed decision to ban Wikipedia from final paper and exam citation.

¹⁴To date, in Wikipedia fourteen languages have more than 100,000 articles each. See http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias

¹⁵ http://www.ala.org/ala/acrl/acrlissues/acrlinfolit/informationliteracy.htm

¹⁶Cf, of course, this Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Neverending