Web 2.0 reports

Just been reading a couple of recently published reports on Web 2.0 relating to education.

The TechWatch report really gets beneath the technologies and while describing many of them in detail (blogs, wikis, RSS etc.) clearly puts them in their place; simply as ways of supporting specific ways of working, attitudes to content and new business models. In fact these technologies return the power of the web to its original intention - the networked 'edit' function - rather than the passive browsing environment it had become for most people. So while we think Web 2.0 is magical and innovative, it is not so new after all, perhaps just a new hype to cash in on renewed enthusaism for the web after the dot.com disillusionment?

The report goes on to discuss implications for education, perhaps the most crucial being issues of 'ownership' and curation of data when learning is spread across numerous systems integrated to varying degrees with institutional administration. We also risk giving over control of this data to commercial enterprises who might not have the same agenda, and users also face access overload on top of existing information overload.

The result of a JISC study into Web 2.0 for sharing learning content is perhaps less good at getting to the heart of definitions and philosophy behind Web 2.0, but the impression I was also left with from reading this was that the more prevalent social networking and informal learning become, the greater the need for formal systems and services such as repositories that take a view on what is of value, act to preserve content and mediate access.