We asked Neal Wollenberg, information and education technology specialist, how he defined Web 2.0, and here is his response:
Oooooh baby, baby it’s a wild world wide web... 2.0.
Okay, maybe Cat Stevens wasn't thinking about Web 2.0 when he wrote the lyrics to Wild World, but in the IET unit we certainly are! Web 2.0 is one of the many techno buzzwords being used today by, well, just about everyone. In May, 2007, I attended a conference in San Francisco aptly titled “Web 2.0 Expo.”
During this expo, many of the participants were given t-shirts that had a printed graphic on the front that said, “Web 2.0 is ______________.” Out of the thousands attending the conference who proudly wore their Web 2.0 t-shirts, I saw two people who had actually filled in the blank.
I thought about this for the entire week of the conference, continually asking myself the question, “Why is everyone, myself included, purposely leaving their shirts blank?”
I came to two conclusions:
* The first was that no one really knows what Web 2.0 is;
* The second was that Web 2.0 is literally “everything” and therefore it is incredibly hard to define with one word.
So at this point in my rambling, you may be asking yourself, “What is Web 2.0 and how does it benefit me as an Extension Agent?” It's a great question and one that I'll try to briefly answer.
First of all, Web 2.0 as we know it is an evolving phenomenon. It truly is hard to define with one word, but it can be narrowed down to the following.
Web 2.0 is a trend in web design and development that provides
1) a second generation of web-based communities (blogs, wikis);
2) web services (RSS, Web Search and Atom feeds); and
3) applications (Content Management Systems, Workflow Management)
…that aim to facilitate creativity, collaboration and sharing between users. (I modified this definition from http://www.cpseo.com/glossary.html)
Personally, I think this is a pretty decent definition. The key word, though, is “users.” The World Wide Web was originally a network of static pages updated by a few people that pushed information at its users with relatively little interactivity. Web 2.0 technologies are
just the opposite, in that different applications, services and communities push to and pull from the user and allow the user to define what s/he wants to interact with.
A second question for Extension professional is, “How does it benefit me.” With Web 2.0 new technologies are emerging every day that take advantage of this interactivity. I'll limit this to one example, but hopefully it will be easy to see this concept applied to other areas in your field of work.
Consider that you may receive an e-mail with a question regarding average daily grain consumption on a Kansas dairy farm. To answer that question, you would need to gather information from as many dairy farmers in Kansas as possible. It may very well be a tedious task, or the information you gather may be a year or two or ten old.
However, what if there were a section of the K-State Research and Extension web site where dairy farmers could go in on a daily basis and record how much grain was being used on their farm, and that information was then immediately and automatically updated on the web site and broken down into any different number of combinations? The information you are needing to reply to the e-mail would be at your finger tips.
Take this a step further and add in an RSS feed that pushes the information out those who have requested it through the Web site. Then you have information that people need, generated and input by many people (rather than tediously gathered by a few) then automatically sent out to the people who need it. Web 2.0 gives us the capability to do this.
So, when we re-ask the question, “What is Web 2.0?” we realize that when we fill in that blank on the t-shirt we can use the word “Us.”
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