Event : Web 2.0 Learning Opportunity: Call for Participants
Date & Time: Monday 29th November - Friday 3rd December, 2010 (9:00 - 16:30)
Venue : Moi University, School of Information Sciences, Main Campus, Eldoret, Kenya
What is Web 2.0?
Web 2.0 is primarily a social, rather than a technological evolution. Web 2.0 is a term that people loosely apply to these new, easier to use web-based tools for content creation (also known as user generated content), connecting with people (also known as social networking), collaboration and many other forms of people to people interaction.
These tools are often called “social media” because they go beyond content, to our connection to that content and to each other.
Social media makes it easy for us to work across four broad areas:
connecting with other people via social networks;
- collaborating and doing things with other people;
- creating and sharing content; and
- finding, using, organizing and reusing content.
Social networking sites are websites that provide the
technology for social networking, including:
- profiles,
- discussions,
- email,
- social network visualization tools; and
- content sharing tools.
There are a number of key strategies for working with content using social media.
They include:
- Collaborative Searching, Finding and Filtering Content
- Tagging Content
- Tagging Content
- Re-using or Re-mixing Content
Rating or Commenting on Content
Like tagging, rating and commenting tools allow us to indicate if web content was useful or accurate for us.
Rating and commenting tools allow input beyond the traditional ‘expert’ model. Many people have very good knowledge in communities, for example. Before they did not have a voice to offer their opinion. Now they do.
Examples of rating and commenting tools include stand alone products, such as:
- polls;
- rating tools (more); and
- annotation tools (more).
Social networking sites
There are also sites that focus on more specific topics and purposes such as:
•
professional networks;
•
language specific networks;
•
local networks; and
•
cause-oriented networks.
Google Maps
When Google Maps made their geographic data available, many organizations used this component to create their own maps; maps of:
•
water resources;
•
endangered languages around the world;
•
plant species in a particular region;
•
political violence incidents in a specific country, etc.
