I got very excited about how the structure of the web is changing under the momentum of web 2.0. The penny dropped when I realised Flickr, YouTube, Google and Del.icio.us, Yahoo Pipes aren’t websites - they’re fundamental web 2.0 service infrastructure.
Those organisations who doing great things in the web2.0 space are those who do one thing and doing it very well. The service often is characterised by openness: empowering everyone to put stuff in, describe and get stuff back out in order to mash, learn, share and collaborate.
It used to be considered poor form for websites to sponge media from other website servers. Flickr, YouTube, Google, and Del.icio.us (including RSS and website APIs) have inverted this. Now these sites positively encourage you to embed content and applications stored on their servers.
The websites of each of these are not really useful in themselves. Their true power really is their capacity to
- mash, repurpose and republish content.
- draw connections between people directly and serendipitously.
This is why (in my mind) they are the key building blocks for the new Web 2.0 world.
What’s could be some key Web 2.0 infrastructure services for education? Some initial thoughts:
- identity management being developed through Meta Access Management System (MAMS) and Australian Access Federation (AAF)
- think combining AAF with the myedna2 project especially considering how edna crosses all Australian sectors, nationally.
- Existing services flickr, YouTube, Google, Yahoo Pipes etc - (assuming they aren’t blocked by firewalls).
What do you think are the key Web 2.0 infrastructure elements for education?
2 Comments
MAMS is quite possibly the least “web 2.0″-like system it is possible to imagine while still having a website.
It’s a centrally designed and administered system, built to solve theoretical problems for website administrators, rather than practical problems for users.
Compare the approach of MAMS to that of OpenID, and compare the adoption each approach has seen.
Hopefully AAF will learn from some of the problems MAMS seen and build a system which is usable as well as well though-out.
Yep totally agree. MAMs would be creating another walled garden - potentially broad acreage for educators. As you say hopefully AAF will learn from the problems.
That said it could form part of basic educational identity management infrastructure to enable other web infrastructure for education.
On the other hand there will always be a need for educators not to use their official identity when they feel they need to take an educational personal/professional risk.
Tangent: Wikipedia is a great example of how to participate, share and liberate knowledge. An innovative use of Wikipedia is by Cerulean Studio’s product Trillian which finds phrases in instant messenger chat and automatically creastes a link. The link’s rollover displays a text version of the Wikipedia article, allowing me to learn background info mid conversion.
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