How does Web 2.0 affect digital humanities scholarship and teaching? Tonight's Digital Humanities forum, hosted by the Center for History and New Media, addressed that question, and raised others, with presentations by Bryan Alexander, Dan Cohen, and Edward Maloney.

Presentations

Bryan blogs at Infocult, Dracula Blogged, and Liberal Education Today. Bryan gave a very succinct and informative overview of various Web 2.0 services. The web is now in the second stage of media development outlined by Janet Murray. The first stage is where new media imitates older media (cinema imitated theater, the web imitated print material). The second stage explores what new things are possible. Specifically, Bryan highlighted the power of microcontent, rather than sites or documents as a whole, and the ability for users to create and critique that microcontent(videos, podcasts, blog posts, commenting). Bryan applauded the collaborative authoring and editing (wikis) and mashups. Web 2.0 is user-centered, thrives on user-generated content, and is mashable and sharable.

Dan gave a brief presentation on Zotero, the Firefox plugin for academic research and citation. Regarding Web 2.0, Dan sees lots of power and potential in collective intelligence and harnessing the power of group activity. So, one of the goals for Zotero in 2007 is storing user information on servers (as opposed to the user's local machine) and aggregating tags, scholarly annotations. Essentially, we want to capitalize on the power of the "long tail" of digital scholarship.

Finally, Edward questioned why education course management lags so far behind other technological developments. Services like Blackboard are dated almost a decade in terms of the technology and culture of the web today. Even more problematic, he argued, is that current college and university course management focus solely on the course, as opposed to the student and instructor. Edward is part of a project called the "Digital Notebook," where students and teachers can keep all their materials created in college, research notes, papers, etc. This kind of college/university application would be student and instructor focused, as opposed to Blackboard.

Overall, really great stuff.

Questions

Portability of Social Networks and "Identities"

The first question that came to my mind was: How should we, as "Web 2.0" scholars and teachers, manage all our "identities" and accounts? How can we effectively combine Flickr, YouTube, del.icio.us, Odeo, Wikipedia, Ma.gnolia, Digg, Blogger/WordPress/TypePad, Newsvine, Google, Upcoming, Bloglines, Technorati, and other Web 2.0 services effectively?

One of the biggest problems I see with Web 2.0 is that, while new services pop-up almost everyday, managing accounts on those services can be a hassle. Web 2.0 is great for social networking, but only within the app itself. Others, like Jeremy Keith and Derek Featherstone, have discussed at length the difficulties with connecting personal information and data across social apps, specifically lists of contacts and friends. Portability and sharing of data across applications seems like the next big issue the social web should tackle, and humanities academics would do well to get involved.

Teaching Students How to Use Web 2.0 Services

Resident teaching-and-learning scholar Mills Kelly asked a very interesting question: How do we teach students how to use the technologies they're already using to learn?

It's not as simple as you might think. Students are already familiar with Flickr, and a good portion of my own students have Facebook or MySpace accounts, and most are familiar with Wikipedia. But how do we integrate this stuff students already use into teaching and learning? We have to teach an academic understanding beyond simple technical proficiency. We have to teach technical proficiency, too.

Where to Go from Here?

For digital humanists, a few things we need to understand and do: We need to teach students new ways of using social applications and services. We need to see value in collaboration across social networks. We need to understand how Web 2.0 applications work, even at a basic level. (That is, it seems beneficial to me to understand what RSS is, how APIs work, what folksonomy and tagging involves, among other things.) We need to have conversations with the designers and developers that build and use these services. Finally, we need to stop talking about how Web 2.0 will help our scholarship and pedagogy, and actually start using it.

Update: Mills beat me to the punch, and posted some nice notes of his own..

[API]: Application Programmers Interface [RSS]: Really Simple Syndication