More rainy day musings and Web 2.0...

To continue my musings (while I still have the "Runners HIGH") from my earlier post ...I got to thinking what is it really that is allowing the rapid development of Innovations in Distance Learning communities? We've been talking about iPODS, educational multimedia videos and Avatars. These are a lot of Tools... great for learning...but why do they work so well and why are little machines like iPODS and the information in them so easily consumable by us? Well, we are social animals and most of us have an instinctual need to stay connected with our tribe.

What set the stage for all of these cool devices and what relationship do they have to Distance Learning? Could it be Web 2.0? What is Web 2.0? If you are not really sure and have never seen this now classic video called "The Machine is Us/ing Us", please click here...then come back and (if you want to) finish reading my blog.

It is Web 2.0 applications which have set the stage for Distance Learning to grow at such a rapid pace. Web 2.0 has changed the way we communicate, forever! The World Wide Web seems to have evolved from a one-directional Cyberplace (my word)-- for example, the Library of Congress online, where you used go to get information about American History, (read it, download it and use the information to write a school assignment, then hand in the hard copy to your teacher, etc.)--- into a globally interconnected system/network of people participating in a multi-party Dialogue (talking, laughing, dancing, if you like, in real time).

Think about it...all the free Social-sharing and networking applications which have evolved during the past decade, such as Flickr; My Space; Google Blogs, Wordpress, Wikis and others have provided a platform on which everyone can play a Dynamic role (imagine a huge broadway Stage circling the planet and we are talking, laughing and dancing). We now share photos, videos, and Blogs which are supported by RSS (Real Simple Syndication). RSS makes it easy to send my own content to a chosen network of friends or others.

The relatively small Social networking system that was once only used by social anarchists to rail against the system or the hermit-like technophiles, happily working out their networking schemes, is the same network (now a considerably larger animal) being used to Spread Learning by your more conservative K-12 schools and Institutions of Higher Learning. All of the Web 2.0 applications and online anarchist and geeky communities have evolved into our newer Distance Learning Communities. Distance Learning is headed into the future at Warp Speed with no turning back...

It does make me wonder...what will those societal anarchists and cave-dwelling tektites work on now---Teleportation??
Diane