Presentation: What is Web 2.0?: Innovate, Assess, Sustain: Writing Pedagogy and Web 2.0″

March 12, 2009

Presentation: What is Web 2.0?: Innovate, Assess, Sustain: Writing Pedagogy and Web 2.0″

Presenters: Tony Atkins, Alisa Cooper, Matt Davis, Kate Hagopian, Susan Cochran-Miller, Colleen Reilly, and Shelley Rodrigo.

First workshop of the Conference for College Composition and Composition in San Francisco, CA is about applying technology applications and their use and connection within pedagogy. Reilly is introducing the workshop and operationalizing “Web 2.0″ now according to Murugesan (2007): “defies a widely agreed-upon, concise definition-perhaps because the underlying phenomenon is huge.” Web 2.0 is all about “remediation”. For example, dictionary taxonomy is now tagging, personal websites are now blogs, mp3.com is now Napster, Brittanica Online is now Wikipedia, according to the slide. I don’t necessarily agree with some of the tool comparisons here; it’s less about the NOUN of the tool. Rather, it should be about the VERB of the tool. I wonder if there’s a more recent example than O’Reilly’s from 2005 (per the citation). Now she’s talking about “mashing”, which we do. Mash-ups creates new portals/interfaces combining resources and feeds from a variety of sources. This allows the user to program the web itself. Check out Programmableweb.

Web 2.0 is a challenge, as the “privileging of non-foundational knowledge construction challenges conventional about the nature of knowledge, learning and academica’s role as the supreme arbiter of ‘truth…” (Eijman, 2008)

Go2Web20.net shows a list of various Web 2.0 tools that includes the the logo. You can click an see the tags, popularity, links (add to tags?), etc…

Another thing I thought was interesting was that this lady requires her students to write for Wikipedia. She makes them find stubs (really short wiki articles). Students begin with stubs and begin to research and synthesize the material into a neutral Wikipedia article. Students are required to cite sources or Wikipedia will delete their work. They have to use online and books. They analyze the features of Wikipedia, what makes an article “good”, they need to use the Wikipedia parenthetical citation code. They need to learn Wikipedia’s writing style.In their post, they need to justify how they wrote what they wrote and why to should not be deleted (“reverted”). There are guidelines about why they are reverted or how often they are permitted to revert an article. A month later they have to write a report on what happened to their article. Is it still there, edited, etc…? By responding to their own writing at a later date, they’re able to really see how their writing is reacted. Check out people.uncw.edu/reillyc/314.

Break out session time. I am sitting with Kate and Tony Atkins to talk about wikis. I hope to talk more about my students use of wikis. Kate’s talk about what a wiki is and how to make one in Wetpaint.com. North Carolina State University requires all students in a class to sign a FERPA consent form. NCSU takes a hardline on FERPA. Kate used her wiki as a tool towards a final project outside of the wiki.

Wikis allow for collective pedagogy, and as using group work people can still do the work wherever you want. If the student can’t make the group meeting, it’s ok; they can work on the Wiki whenever. Tony Atkins is now talking about how to use wikis for CMS.

Alisa Cooper is now talking about microblogging, but most of what she’s saying I already know. I was asked to sit in on this session to support this. One thing I got out of this was a Posterous account. Mine is now nooccar.posterous.com. Cool. I am going to keep using Posterous for CCCC.

Tony is now talking Video, and I am pretty excited because this is more of what I want to be doing. He’s talking Animoto and RockYou.com. I’ve nvever heard of RockYou, so I want to check that out soon. In these you dump your images, choose your music, and sit back! It builds a music video for you from your images and the music. The music is Creative Commons free songs on Animoto are great, and the last Animoto video I made used “Beautiful Life” which worked very well.

I was telling the group here that we use Animoto the first week of classes to take a “blink” snapshot of the students and who they are. The only real requirement was that they use at least one image of themselves. This gives us an idea of who these students are, especially since we usually will never see them face2face unless we do conferences of some sort.

He’s talking Camtasia now, which would be cool if they made it for MACs. It’s still just PC, but now he’s moved onto Whordle. In Whordle, you feed something like a blog, text, etc… and the program then calculates how often certain words are used and then creates and image of that words cluster.

Tony’s talking Video composition and discussing the differences between video editing applications in Windows and OSX. He’s talking iMovie, Final Cut Pro, Final Cut Express, Windows Movie Maker, etc… J Anthony Blair’s article is in a book on challenging visual rhetoric, and that brought up a discussion of advertising over the last 8 decades.

When using any new technology or composition type, we need to know WHY we use these tools. What are the philosophical, pedagogical, etc… underpinnings of these tools. We, as educators, need to answer that.

Posted in conferences, web2.0