Writing today on a draft for an abstract The internet has been upgraded to 2.0! Have our theories and practices followed? Investigating the Web 2.0 trend from a learning theoretical perspective , I got a bit carried away and it began to form a draft for an article. I was reflecting a bit on potentials of Web 2.0 on learning theory and how it might bring our theories further. I began thinking about some of the fundamentals of Web 2.0 - 'sharing', 'collaborating' and the term 'social software'. I will get back to these reflections a bit later.

Though, the term and movement around Web 2.0 is both hyped and buzzed, I think the Web 2.0 movement show some emerging patterns or trends with similarities to current developments of socio-cultural learning theories - and this, I think, is quite interesting, though I must reserve this for a later posting!

First, however, it is worth mentioning that there are very serious dark sides of the Web 2.0, both in terms of surveillance and privacy infringements, but also related to commercial interests. There are plenty of reasons why Yahoo, Microsoft and Google host numerous Web 2.0 services free of charge and why Rupert Murdoch bought one the largest social networking sites MySpace.com. Here I would especially refer to a recent blog posting by Ben Werdmuller: http://elgg.net/bwerdmuller/weblog/14995.html

But also PhD student Michael Zimmer has posted quite a lot on his blog on these issues: http://michaelzimmer.org/category/web-20/

This critique certainly highlights the need for education and non-profit institutions to take up these issues as to create a counter movement based on other principles.

Anyway, when I started thinking about the web 2.0 - initially under a heading of 'From directories and taxonomies to tag-clouds and folksonomies' I began to think a bit about Flickr, Furl, elgg and other tag-driven services - 

In such services the ascription of 'the meaning’ of a picture and the information architecture of the entire site is not decided or defined by a ‘center’ or authority, but by the various users, through tagging. In a way activity of tagging is a process of, what I will coin intersubject-diversification or fragsensus, thus spinning a pun on intersubjectivity/consensus and diversity/fragmentation. Tagging activity does crystallise in both an enormous fragmentation, but at the same time a sort of 'consensus' emanating through tag-clouds and clustering of tags. In a sense order emerges out of chaos and stucture out of the unstructured. But still the unstructured and chaotic remain present at all  time - there's certainly still a strong sense of fragmentation and diversity visible.

However, 'fragsensus' is not only something connected to tagging. When beginning to think of Wikis, I thought of what they are often associated with - namely 'Collaborative writing'...In what sense do Wikis represent  'Collaborative'. Within the research field of 'Computer Supported Collaborative Learning' the term collaboration has a very special meaning e.g. take a citation from CSCL litterature:

"When referring to collaboration, about what is one actually speaking? To put it simply, in the public conversation the term 'collaboration' appears to refer to any activities that a pair of individuals, or a group of people perform together. Among researchers, however, including those in academic fields, the term 'collaboration' is understood rather differently. Within learning sciences, common to the different definitions of collaboration is that they stress the idea of co construction of knowledge and mutual engagement of participants. In this sense, collaboration can be considered as a special form of interaction."  (Lipponen, 2006)

When reading through citations from CSCL litteraure it seems evident that collaboration is defined in terms of: Joint accomplishment, mutual engagement, coordinated effort, inderdependence, solving problems together – collaboration is even seen as a special form of interaction. But in which ways are Wikis 'collaborative' in the CSCL-way of understanding the term? I can go to an open Wiki, add some changes, disappear and never come back – but my addition might still be there, though others will never know who actually made the addition? Creation and maintenance of a Wiki-page might not actually encompass any form of coordination between the different editors, they might not even know, who the others are (apart from “Guest” made this revision) and there might not be any sort of shared problem or focus.

If we compared this to building a house it could be the same as working without a pre-determined blueprint and just some workers popping by independently of each other, with different types of material, adding a brick, removing a girder etc. and suddenly there would be a house of a reasonable quality. This is not to suggest that this reflect the general way of wiki-writing - but I will suggest that the term 'collaboration' understood as within CSCL might not always fit tools such as Wikis - maybe 'fragsensus' or a term composed of distribution and collaboration, such as 'Distriboration' or 'Collaboramentation' as composed of Collaboration and fragmentation would fit better the process?

Also - in which sense can we talk about ‘collaboration’ and ‘sharing’ if I for instance publish an aggregation of blog-postings, pictures, shared links and other micro-content on a page - or create an RSS-feed that summarises and pull together these pieces of content. In a sense it is a ‘collaborative’ tapestry, as people will keep adding to it (potentially or most likely not knowing they are), but is it collaborative in the CSCL-definition?

Even the terms of 'social' in social software and social relations become obscured. To what degree are people related when they link to other’s blogs or comment on a blog posting; how are people related to those whose blogs or links they subscribe to? Even though we are talking about social software, the notions of ‘social’ and ‘social relations’ do seem to take on other guises that do not seem to fit, for instance, the notion of “social learning” expressed in the CSCL-citations and general literature on learning theory. Here social learning is often taken to be collaboration or moments of learning in which people are strongly linked together and working on (or with) a shared problem.

The Web 2.0 and the sort of loose ties that can exist between people are very interesting. And the notions of aggregation and distribution - or maybe words such as patchworking and tapestry would be better: thus signifying a process where people from the myriads of resources weave their 'tapestry' of news, pictures, podcasts, interesting links and blogpostings or collectively add to the patchwork by sewing together and presenting patches produced by others. I think there are some interesting links to the notion of 'networked individualism' here - in a sense the above mentioned are not quite social or collaborative in the sort of CSCL-definition; but certainly they are not individul either - there is a strange interweaving between individuality and something profoundly relational...an interweaving I cannot quite graps with words or concepts yet and as thus will remain 'work in progress'.

I don't know if the terms or concepts I have suggested are very apt descriptors, but I think web 2.0, wikis and social software in general prompt us to rethink concepts such as collaboration, social and social relations. Not that these terms in any way are becoming obsolete (far from) but maybe there are better ways of describing them? Terms that might open our eyes to other relations between people and broaden the scope of what we think of as learning.