Web 2.0 Scholarship - Curt Bonk

Cheers! to Dr. Bonk for his synchronous video lecture and Q&A on Scholarship and Web 2.0. Part way through Bonk's lecture, I realized the topic was not as new to me as I had thought it was. I've been using academically produced, online publications and learning objects for a few years; moreover, I've been modifying them and combining them with other material to suit my own purpose or that of my students. The new element in the topic for me is the ramification of Web 2.0 Scholarship---authority and control are changing hands in the academic world just as they have in the day-to-day world. Control over publishing, multi-media, interactive learning objects, video, audio---control over it all passed into the collective world population a few years ago, or more. And now control over "the news" is changing, as various forms of reportage generated by day-to-day citizens appear throughout the structure of the Web.

My previous education is largely grounded in an older model of authority. For example, if Nature, Scientific American, or Popular Mechanics chose to publish an article, the content was to be trusted. The publication was the authority (and in fact still is in many cases). Now I find a considerable portion of my academic reading online, freely available; in this class we're reading non-traditionally published articles. So where does "authority" fit in? Perhaps it rests in the expertise of the instructor who selectes them. Perhaps it rests in part within the community which links to the publications. Just maybe, it rests also within the consumer---after all, judging by blogs and posts in several ITEC classes, we've generally agreed that students (that's us) need to know how to find, evaluate, and store information for subsequent retrieval.

I believe there's a lot of cheerleading and overestimation associated with Web 2.0. The scholarship aspect of 2.0 reminds me very much of the beginnings of the Open Source Software movement, which has empowered thousands of programmers whose combined efforts have benefitted millions of people---even if the computing world is still largely running proprietary operating systems and software. Control and authority are forever redefined---that won't change. Web 2.0 continues to grow as new tools are created and the initial use of those tools morphs into multiple purposes, including education.