Web 2.0 and “Minds on Fire”
As I wrote on Twitter, I spent much of the weekend crafting a foreword for a new book that’s supposed to be out in September (Liz Stephens and Kerry Ballast’s Using Technology to Teach Adolescent Writing). Liz, an NWP site director, and Kerry, an NWP teaching consultant (what you all will be after the institute), have really done a great job with the book and on every page you can see how NWP values inform their thinking. The theory or contentions are upfront and are followed by a thoughtful discussion of teaching plans. They have taken promising lessons and then have remade them, infusing them with appropriate uses of digital media. Here’s their argument presented as a question: “Since teens are reading, writing, and creating extensively on the web, shouldn’t educators explore how they are doing that?” We’re, of course, immersing ourselves in technology and writing this summer as well.
One of the features I really like about the book is the authors’ turn to Web 2.0 environments. Here’s how John Seely Brown and Richard Atkins define what they see as new 21st century web developments (from their “Minds on Fire” (http://www.johnseelybrown.com/):
The original World Wide Web—the “Web 1.0” that emerged in the mid-1990s—vastly expanded access to information. . . . But the Web 2.0, which has emerged in just the past few years, is sparking an even more far-reaching revolution. Tools such as blogs, wikis, social networks, tagging systems, mashups, and content-sharing sites are examples of a new user-centric information infrastructure that emphasizes participation (e.g., creating, re-mixing) over presentation, that encourages focused conversation and short briefs (often written in a less technical, public vernacular) rather than traditional publication, and that facilitates innovative explorations, experimentations, and purposeful tinkerings (my emphasis) that often form the basis of a situated understanding emerging from action, not passivity. (“Minds on Fire” p. 30)
Some of the experiences we’ve had this summer—YouTube, blogging, Twitter and more—would fall under the category of Web 2.0 tools. I love Brown and Adler’s notion of “purposeful tinkerings” by the way. In any case, as soon as this book is out, I will let you know. It would have been a wonderful addition to our reading in the institiute.
Leave a Reply