At the risk of starting another friendly argument about the true nature of information, I’d like to talk a bit about this almost sacred topic. But I do not want to talk about information itself, but about the information landscape that has formed around us under the seismic forces of the “Oh so” seductive advances in technology over the past few years. I say seductive because, ..well have you had a chance to actually fondle an iPhone?
As I reported yesterday, I’ve been working on the sidebars of my blog. It relaxes me. But this morning, I decided to follow that theme a bit, and to look up some of the widgets that are offered through one of my favorite web sites, Technorati. I usually describe this site by saying that, “Technorati is to the blogosphere, what Google is to the web.” If you want to learn about a thing, you go to Google, where you’ll get thousands or millions (got a billion the other day) of web sites, most of which have been formally published. However, if you want to know what people think about a thing, what the anticipate, what they love, what they hate, what they don’t understand, or what they think they understand — then you go to Technorati.
What I find intriguing about this site, and about today’s emerging information landscape is that for the first time in history, we are laying our thoughts, desires, loves, hates, and conversations down for the record. We are remembering ourselves in a way that has never been possible before, and as a result, we can now produce a photograph, so to speak, of the human experience, as reported by the tens of millions of people, world-wide, who are blogging it.
Dave Sifry, the CEO of Technorati, posts in his blog, Sifrey’s Alerts, a quarterly report on the state of the blogosphere. His latest, on April 7, 2007, reports on the growth of the blogosphere, what people are blogging about, who’s blogging, and how many people are reading them. To the right is a portion of one of Dave’s graphs, illustrating how many blogs are posted on a single day, and the world events that may have contributed to spikes in blog writing.
Another part that I enjoy watching is the languages that are being spoken in the blogosphere. There is an ongoing competition between English and Japanese. Today, it’s Japanese, with 37% of blogs, followed very closely by English, with 36%.
| View top news |
Back to the widgets — Technorati features a web page with a number of widgets that you can install on your blog or other web pages, that produces a pipe from the greater blogosphere directly to your readers. Here’s one that lists the news stories that are being written about the most by bloggers.
Here are two others that display the search terms that people are using most often today as the seek to tap into the global conversation about various topics. The second one is a tag cloud of terms that bloggers are most frequently tagging their blogs with.
| Technorati Top Searches | Technorati Top Tags |
There is also a ticker type display that scrolls through search terms that people are entering in real time. I won’t display that one, because we are a weird species with very weird interests.
By the way, what is a … Oh, never mind. I really don’t want to know!
This one was, by far, the most interesting. You can type in a topic, and the widget will generate a graph that illustrates the number of blogs that included the term over the past 7 to 360 days. Again, it’s a picture of the human experience.
Posts that contain education per day for the last 30 days.
Get your own chart!
Those of us educators who blog are occassionally asked, “What is Web 2.0?” Sometimes I’m even asked, “What is Web 1.0?” Of course there are many ways to distinguish the two, but one comparison that I think is useful to us, as educators, is that Web 1.0 respects authority. For years, web pages have been published by people who had the technical skills to publish to the web or institutions who could afford to hire people with the technical skills to publish on the web. There are certainly lots of exceptions, and the Web never earned the creds of almost any library. Yet credentials were required, if only a working knowledge of Frontpage, and monthly payments to a web hosting company.
By contrast, Web 2.0 respects the community. With free blogging, anyone with access to the Internet, basic spelling, and something to say, has a voice to the world. From blogger.com, almost anyone can set up a blog in about five minutes — without any help.
So the question that continues to nag at me is, “What does it mean to be literate in an increasingly networked and participatory, digital and reader directed, overwhelming and uncontainable information environment? What other skills should students be learning that are as critical today as the ability to read text, process numbers, and write a coherent paragraph?”
“Technorati Widgets.” Technorati. 2 Sep 2007. Technorati, Inc.. 2 Sep 2007 <http://www.technorati.com/widgets/blogwidgets>.
David,
When you define Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 you ascribe motives to technological improvements that occurred incrementally and chaotically. Agreeing with you requires the reader to accept a conspiracy theory with no basis in reality.
There was no secret top-down plan to respect authority (bad) or respect the community (good). This is like saying that horses were bad and automobiles are good.
I think you offer a false dichotomy that provides confusion rather than clarity.
Who says respecting authority is bad? I didn’t take the comments about Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 like that at all. My understanding of what was said is that a person used to have some sort of credentials if they authored something posted on the “web”. That person was an “authority” on something, and the web respected that authority by publishing his/her thoughts or writings. Now, however, it’s much easier for anyone to post thoughts, so the “authority” can’t be presumed, and the respect has shifted to the community of thinkers. I’ve been accused of wearing rose-colored glasses, but I fail to see how respect for authority would be “bad” anyway.
The implication is clear in the way that David frames his definitions. The “from this to that” rhetoric suggests progress from darkness to light. David is an accomplished wordsmith who I hope believes what he says.
If you don’t agree, take my interpretation out of the equation. The definitions still don’t work.
What does it mean to be literate in an increasingly networked and participatory, digital and reader directed, overwhelming and uncontainable information environment? What other skills should students be learning that are as critical today as the ability to read text, process numbers, and write a coherent paragraph?â€
The ability and desire to censor themselves so that intellectual and social commentary will be at a comprehensible and sophisticated level which would warrant further dialogue. And, of course, the ability to discern credible information and/or coherent opinions.
Gary, thanks for your post. I rather enjoyed the image of a bunch of ’60s “power to the people” radicals, meeting in a basement and planning a more democratic and free-love Internet. But I do not believe that, nor do I see any reason why anyone else would have to believe that to follow my line of reasoning. I reread my post, acknowledging that I do, from time to time, mis-represent my position by poor wording. But I saw nothing that could lead to your “darkness to light” interpretation.
In fact, I think that I suggested a coexistence of Web 1 and Web 2, and I happen to believe that they should coexist.
It is simply the evolving way that web tools have gone and the evolving ways that people use the web. I don’t know if it’s a natural progression, but I still think that it affects our notions of literacy.
As I have said before, I believe that convincing the public that our children need technology skills (digital literacy) remains a hard sell. But we may be able to convince them that basic literacy should be expanded — because it starts at a place that people understand.
I really appreciate this post, and especially your definitions of Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. I spent a good deal of time trying to clarify this for colleagues, but had not come up with something so concise.
I think your definitions point to the dilemma we should be in as educators at this point. So much of education historically has been about authority. Information was to flow from (a small number of) experts to novices, with little room for interaction. Now we are confronted with students who live in a world of collaboration and authorship and we should be confronted by what are we going to do with them.
This is really the challenge I am trying to embrace as the school year begins.