’Reilly, T. (2006) ‘What Is
Web 2.0: Design Patterns And Business Models
For
The Next Generation Of Software’
Tim O’Reilly’s article points out how
social media e.g. blogging allows the creator and reader to communicate
transforming published text to being participatory. This process is essential
for my learning on the BAPP course as it allows me to comment and raise
information based on professional practice. Using this process I can better my
learning and alter the way I think by looking at topics from a reflective point
of view and questioning people’s opinions. The ‘Wisdom of crowds’ (James
Suriowecki) is important within blogging as you will gain more out of your
blog if you create a following and get people commenting.
My Participation of Web 2.0 and Ethical
Considerations.
Web 2.0 allows people to interact and
participate more easily for example; using web 2.0 I am able to communicate
with fellow students without meeting them in person with such tools as
blogging, emailing and Skype etc. Being part of various social networks I am
able to participate, be creative and engage with a wide audience. If I was to pose
a question on a social network site, instead of getting one answer I would get
answers from various people. This process is helpful for advertising an event
or cause as friends/ colleagues will share your post informing more people,
then more people again.
A status or blog can also create a
discussion or encourage opinions on relevant topics. However, social networks have to have
security measures in place as personal details and photos can be too easily
accessible. Being in the teaching
profession I have to be very careful what I post and what people post about me
on social network sites, it’s about trusting your users and keeping your
integrity as a user. Working with children you have to be very careful what you
publish on social networks and who can access them. There are many issues
regarding child protection and safeguarding, but these are in place to protect
children from cyber nemeses. Kuehn
brought this to the for front for me in his quote on teachers using facebook;
“Teachers
are probably the most vulnerable group in danger from violations of boundary
crossing between one’s personal and professional lives.” Kuehn,
2010 p86.
Being a singing teacher I came across
these difficulties during Task 1d:2d Images. For this task I wanted to show
some pictures of my singing lessons as teaching is a prominent part of my
professional practice. I approached my employer ‘Starmaker’ to find out if
parents have signed consent forms for their children to be videoed/photographed
when joining the school for promotional purposes. I can confirm that each child I filmed in my
video ‘Happy Ending’ which I posted on my Flickr account and YouTube had
written permission to be film. Below is
the link to Starmaker’s Terms and conditions page which allows you to access
the questions parents signed registering at the school.
Having this permission demonstrating an
extract of my singing class helps me to promote self-professional practice as a
vocal tutor, and promote ‘Starmaker’ , giving us both better exposure and
advertising.
However, it is our own responsibility to
be aware of an effect of an action carried out or decision made on social
network sites e.g. status updates, friends uploading photos of you, blog post
etc. can have a negative effect. As a teacher I am responsible of what is
posted on my social network sites and who can access them, if I don’t control
this then problematic situations could arise.
What difficulties have you come across using social network sites?
As a singing teacher I participate on web
2.0 on a regular basis often using ‘Google’ and ‘YouTube’ to research new
singing games, activity ideas and song choice ideas. Web 2.0 allows individuals
to share innovative ideas to a greater audience and generate discussion and
comments.
Collective Intelligence of Web 2.0
Feenberg and Bakardjieva (2004) extract
stood out for me explaining how Web 2.0 allowed communities to develop;
"existing
professional networks’ and
offer a “Social space for people,
strangers and almost strangers with diverse backgrounds to come together as
equals, as generators of ideas, to deliberate and act collectively”
Feenberg, A. &
Bakardjieva, M. (2004) 'Virtual community: No killer implication’, New
Media & Society, vol. 6,
no. 1, p. 37.
Reader 1 triggers ideas that connecting
with people, “communities will evolve,
encouraging and supporting collaboration and facilitate debate and discussion”.
Gruber (2007) three components stood out
to me how social interaction and collective intelligence has grown.
·
A social system, supported by computing
and communication technology, which generates self-service problem solving discussions
on the Internet.
·
A search engine that is good at finding
questions and answers in this body of content.
·
Intelligent users, who know how to
formulate their problems in queries that the search engine can match to online question/answer
pairs.
(Gruber,
T. (2008)'Collective knowledge systems: Where the social web meets the semantic
web', Web Semantics: Science, Services and Agents on the World Wide Web, vol.
6, no. 1, pp. 4-13.)
If Web 2.0 makes systems consistently
better then web 2.0 platforms will continue to evolve and grow.
In Social Media statistics: January 27,
2013 at 10:04pm prove how popular social media sites are and how many users
there are daily. Within the top five are websites I use on a daily basis for
personal use and professional practice:
·
Facebook: 1 billion users; 604 million
mobile users; More than 42 million pages and 9 million apps.
·
YouTube: 800 million users, 4 billion
views per day.
·
Twitter: 500 million total users, more
than 200 million active users.
·
Google+: 400 million registered users, 135
million active users.
Statistics like these make you think do
people of today’s society feel out of place if they don’t have a Facebook
account?
Conclusion of thoughts on web 2.0
I’m guilty of using the internet for
research e.g. finding drama games for kids to help my teaching. I also use Google
on a daily basis. You can say has web 2.0 created a lazy nation or a pro-active
nation? Many people use Google to type a question in to find out an answer rather
than going to a library or other sources of information. However, with the vast
collective intelligence on the internet do we gain more information from the internet
than if we sourced from elsewhere? We have to consider is the information found
on the internet reliable? With people able to have an opinion and comment using
Web 2.0 tools factual information can be altered or derailed from the truth. I
explain this as a Chinese whisper affect; someone can post a question or piece of
information on a social network site then by the time people have commented and
shared opinions the original question or piece of information can be completely
different .
Having so many people easily accessible it
is great for publicity/advertising to share events or raise awareness of
current affairs. Web 2.0 keeps people more connected and allow universal
communication. Overall Web 2.0 is key to
professional practice, it develops the individual and keeps them connected with
the wider world and grows as new communication technologies develop for the
better.
