Elearning - February/March 2008 - (Page 23) Using MAKING THE INTERNET PARTICIPATORY AND DYNAMIC Web 2.0 Tools cycled through individual image frames in sequence to convey animation, and Java applets displayed text in fiery flames. Most home Internet connections were too slow to support the streaming audio or video that we take for granted today. Today, broadband and wireless Internet access are accessible in homes, offices, schools and coffee shops. Today’s computers have multiple processors; memory is cheap; and new formats for compressing audio and video enable their rapid transfer over the Internet. The World Wide Web is used to do business, download entertainment, shop, send messages, meet new people, and make our voices heard. PARTICIPATE Web 2.0 shifts the focus from Websites to Web applications, where content added by one user enriches the value of the application for all users. O’Reilly calls this “harnessing collective intelligence.” Flickr, YouTube, del.icio.us, Google Maps, Blogger, Wikipedia and Facebook are among the genre of interactive applications collectively known as Web 2.0. The Web 2.0 term for this new model is “Software as a Service” (SaaS). Both the application and its data reside “in the cloud” of the Internet and not on the desktop, so they are accessible from virtually anywhere. In a technology course introducing these Elearning! February/March 2008 23 B Y M A R K F RY D E N B E R G They use it — but may not know it has a name. Most college students have accounts on Facebook, refer to Wikipedia when writing a research paper, share pictures on Flickr, and make phone calls over Skype. Students and employees use the World Wide Web much differently today than was possible even five years ago, when the Web was primarily a tool for disseminating information. In 2005, Tim O’Reilly, founder of O’Reilly Media, publisher of several software and technology books, coined “Web 2.0” for the ongoing change to a more participatory and dynamic Web experience. To introduce these concepts and their underlying technologies to students, I developed a first-year undergraduate information technology course with the theme “Information Technology Through the Lens of Web 2.0.” First offered during fall, 2007 at Bentley College, in Waltham, Mass., the course presented Web 2.0 concepts in a progression that built on previous learning. (See Figure 1.) APPRECIATE A decade ago, Netscape and Mosaic were the two prominent Web browsers, and most Web pages contained hyperlinks to other static documents, Websites and images that took a long time to download over a 56 KB modem. Animated GIFs (graphics files)
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