BA (hons) Professional Practice

Monday, 14 February 2011

Some early thoughts into the exploration of pros and cons in web 2.0

Web 2.0 is probably one of the most useful tools we have in development of learning and access to information. It’s fast and efficient and we can create platform to display ourselves and reach millions of people all over the world.  Of course for every pro there is a con and often I find myself just sitting and procrastinating, because I have access to so much data I often venture off. I also find it difficult to extract useful information and spend hours searching for relative information that is constructive and correct.

3 comments:

  1. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  2. Hi Nicole
    This blog and the one below are really interesting. You explore some theories below but how is web 2.0 a positive. Is it good to be able to communicate and network? As you seem to point out that communication is not with everyone only those who have internet access and this is not a self selecting group. Can there be too much information about you? What is the relationship between information, knowledge and understanding?

    What 'cons' are there to web 2.0? do you have any specific experience of positive and negative attributes of web 2.0 to draw conclusions from?

    Adesola

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  3. I think you have hit on an important issue and that is about a change in the skills required to work in a professional environment in a 21st century world. In many ways the volume of information available is not significantly different, but our ability to access it and search it is. People always wrote diaries. we just couldn't access them. Now they write blogs, which we can. This exponential growth in access means we need to develop new ways of deciding whether the information we see is;

    interesting
    relevant
    believable
    trustworthy
    important
    game changing
    boring
    wrong

    and to do that we need to develop new skills in searching (trying to filter the good from the bad) and new skills in interpreting (what does all the information mean?).

    A friend of mine who was an early adopter of blogs commented when his google reader reached epic proportions and he was spending hours a day reading blogs, that in this 'new-ish' world we spend hours more time, reading thousands more pieces of data to find that one piece of important information, and all that might be is a picture of a cat with a funny saying that made me laugh that day.

    So, a good question for discussion;
    How do you sort online information?
    How do you search online information?
    How do you prioritize online information?

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