Web 2.0
Technology moves at a blistering pace. When I was in high school
it was the time that everyone was on dial up AOL and AIM was the way to
communicate. We were in web 1.0 where the internet was a collecting of
information that you could look up, an electronic encyclopedia. If you needed to get on the internet
for research or to email you had to make your way to wherever your computer
was, dial into AOL and wait for it to connect. Reeeee iiiiiii aaaaaa uuuuuu shhhhhhhh, you all know that dial up tone. If there were a lot of
people online you might get a busy tone and have to try again. If someone
picked up the phone the connection would be lost. If you only had
one home phone line and if you were online then of course your phone line would be
busy so there would be no incoming calls. Fast forward 15 years and now
most kids have, at their disposal, the ability to text/tweet/email anyone on a
device they carry with them. This is the age of web 2.0 where the web is what
we make of it. From wikis to blogs to Facebook, web 2.0 is different for
every person and everyone has different levels of involvement. Students
and people are connected to each other more than at any point before
in human history. Our "five degrees of separation" is getting smaller as we are all getting
closer. Students here in America can play video games with someone in
Japan while Skyping with someone in India. With all of the new web tools
and resources we must, as educators, have the ability and desire to stay on top
of the latest technology and be creative in ways to integrate them into our
subject area. Students today are more connected and have more information
at their fingertips than any group of students before. The cell phones
that most teenagers have today in their pocket, is many times more powerful
than the computer of a few decades ago. And they fill a pocket, not an entire room.
These devices will only continue to get more powerful, faster, and more capable
than the ones we have today. Eventually the devices we use today, like laptops,
will be just as obsolete as the vacuum tube super computer of 50 years ago. The revolution is upon us, are you prepared?
You are so right! It seems as if dial up never existed it was long ago - or so it seems. I remember I would just give up on dial up because it was so slow. Imagine we went from dial up to texting without a phone! My daughter sends texts from her iPod and she does NOT even need a phone-this is what I am trying to convince her of anyway.
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