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A New Social Context for Information
1/16/2008
- "It's time to assess what value using Second Life had for my accounting class. What I want to discuss here are the results of a survey I posted for my students (using SurveyGizmo) during the last few days of the semester. I wanted to gauge their assessment of the various technological tools I used over the semester: Second Life, Twitter, Meebo, and Cmap Tools." -- From a blog of a faculty member using SL. One result: His students found SL too difficult to use.
- "NASA is showing a lot of interest in Virtual Worlds recently. They are running a weekend workshop at the end of January in San Jose, CA." -- from a SL list.
- "Jan 6: ZeroG SkyDancers III -- Virtual Flight Choreography Premieres: Dan Coyote Antonelli is accustomed to breaking new ground. Even in virtual worlds he is considered avant garde. The real man controlling that avatar, DC Spensley, has been wowing virtual audiences since 2006 with art installations that would not be possible in real life, but perhaps the most coveted ticket in all of Second Life is one to a performance by his ZeroG SkyDancers. On January 6, 2008, the premiere of the highly anticipated, third, completely redesigned production of ZeroG SkyDancers will debut." -- from a New Media Consortium post.
Faculty members, librarians, researchers, and students feel their familiar world tilting a bit. As Eddie Maloney of Georgetown University said earlier this year, "What we can see in the Web's evolution is a new focus on innovation, creation, and collaboration, and an emphasis on collective knowledge over static information delivery, knowledge management over content management, and social interaction over isolated surfing."
A combination of relatively new open source development environments, architectures, languages, and models, along with the opportunity to change the world with very little financial capital (though a great deal of intellectual capital), has brought about a steady flow of new Web 2.0 sites and links. "Open" is the key. Web 2.0 is highly entrepreneurial.
A faculty member whose recent surgery keeps him homebound teaches his courses in Second Life (like the economics professor quoted above) -- http://secondlife.com/ -- which his colleagues in his home department can hardly imagine. One of his students may employ the following strategy to write an assigned paper:
- She uses Flickr -- http://www.flickr.com/ -- to get ideas for images to include in her report (or stores her own images there)
- Uses Del-icio-us -- http://del.icio.us/ -- to store her bookmarked research sites
- Wikipedia -- http://wikipedia.org/ -- to clarify the definitions of key terms
- Consults relevant blogs by checking in with Technorati -- http://technorati.com/ -- which allows her to search the blogosphere
- Searches YouTube -- http://www.youtube.com/ -- to find videos related to her topic
- Checks in with her friends at Facebook -- http://www.facebook.com/ -- to see if anyone has ideas about her project
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