Web 2.0 matters

25th February 2006

posted in web 2.0 |

In his post “The New Literacies: Essential or Enrichment?” on the TechLearning blog last week, David Jakes cites some impressive statistics making the case for why web 2.0 matters in our lives today and should matter in classrooms:

Blogs became a new standard when 70,000 are created each day, when between 700,000 and 1.3 million posts are made per day, and when the blogosphere became 30 times greater in size than it was 3 years ago (see Will’s original post about the data here)

RSS became a new standard when just about everything started showing up with those little orange RSS or XML “chicklets.” Syndication of content through RSS is now mainstream.

Wikis became a new standard when the world’s largest online encyclopedia is hosted on one.

Flickr became a standard when 100 million photographs were posted in over a little over two years. Two years!

It is true that few people today, including teachers, are regularly using web 2.0 tools to access and share information. It is not true, however, to conclude that we should wait to move forward in embracing the potential of these tools to help students cultivate 21st century literacy skills until more people are in the loop about them.

On this day..

Knowledge and learning require both transmission and construction - 2008
iRiver T10 firmware frustrations - 2007
Fiber to the schoolhouse - 2006
Podcast36: Genocide in Darfur: Speaking Out on Human Rights - 2006
Snow Days are the Best Days - 2005

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 25th, 2006 at 5:02 pm and is filed under web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.