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blogging services like Blogger, TypePad or
WordPress; we can share our photos in flickr,
defining our different social circles (friends, family,
colleagues); we can define, manage and extend our
social (personal or even professional) networking
(contact networks) with Linked, eConozco or Orkut
services; we may also collaborate online with project
management tools like BaseCamp or wiki services
like SocialText or eApuntes; if you want to, you can
publish your videos or audio clips in OurMedia, or
broadcast your podcasts through Odeo; You can
access to encyclopedia-like articles with an
outstanding update frequency in Wikipedia... the list
grows to the infinite.
It's time for the real productive consumers – beyond
the DIYers-like prosumers of the third wave
announced by Alvin Toeffler – to lead the way.
Anybody can contribute to a global categorization
effort, the collaborative semantic tagging process
that is taking place all over the world through
folksonomies services like Blogmarks, del.icio.us,
de.lirio.us or Wists. This kind of project is not viable
for any centralized computing resources you could
ever imagine before.
We can try to visualize the Web 2.0
conceptualization in a layered scheme (Figure 1),
where the Web itself appears as the technology
platform supporting a growing and emergent amount
of new applications and services we can consider as
belonging to a single (wide-sense) social software
concept. Upon this social software layer, we can
realize the existence of a processes layer where the
emergence of new human-technology interactions
takes place shaping new habits, routines and
information “prosumtion” patterns. Finally, we find
the social networks people are building within a new
(cyber)social environment that resemble some kind
of “real virtuallity”, bridging the current gap people
usually see between their lives in the real world and
their different “avatars” within the Internet.
If we open up each of these layers (Figure 2) we're
talking about, we'll find a growing amount of
different components; a series of elements, each of
them with its own domain, but contributing - as a
whole - to the new “platform” that is been built upon
the New Generation Internet. In the technology
layer, we can identify microformats like xhtml or
FOAF (Friend-Of-A-Friend) that could be
generalized as semantic web technologies (with
small letters, to be differentiated from Semantic
Web efforts from W3C), Web Services acronyms
(UDDI, WSDL, XML, SOAP, XSLT), SOA as THE
architectural paradigm or AJAX as a new
technology combo aiming the developing of a new
generation of rich user interfaces.
The majority of them appear in the detailed figure
below, while you can miss some acronyms. Don't
worry about it; it's the same with the upper layers: in
the social software one, you have blogs (all kinds of
weblogs), wikis, folksonomies... and the you can see
processes like blogging, tagging, sharing... and the
corresponding actions in the social layer but, at the
end of the day, the key driver to have such a kind of
layered architecture “up and running” must be
innovation, USER INNOVATION, and its
representation at every level in the scheme. That is
the actual engine of this conceptualization, the only
one that can support the conversational dynamic and
emergent nature of this Next Generation Web.
3 EDUCATION 2.0
The history of the pedagogical models behind the
traditional learning systems and tools has been built
upon a series of well-known theories that have to put
up with the new challenges the network society is
realizing. If we briefly review these theories, in
chronological order, we’ll be able to establish some
kind of evolutionary path to end up with the “E-
learning 2.0” (Downes, 2005) that could be
considered as the iCamp conceptual framework.
Behaviorism is related with a passive learner and a
traditional transfer mode for teaching in a one-way
unidirectional (verbal) communication. This model
is based on the “know-what” paradigm.
Cognitivism is related with an active learner and a
not so traditional tutor mode for teaching in a bi-
directional (mostly verbal and unbalanced)
communication. This model is based on the “know-
how” paradigm.
Constructivism is related with a so-called creative
learner and a hardly seen coaching mode for
teaching in a two-way bi-directional (mostly visual
and almost balanced) communication. This model is
based on the “knowing-in-action” (“learning-by-
Figure 1: Web 2.0 layered scheme (I).
WEBIST 2006 - E-LEARNING
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