Day 4

Ok, continuing with yesterday’s question but I’d like to expand more into communication, so ‘why web 2.0 is not only well suited for learning but also for communication’?

Having mentioned in my previous diary, Blogs have been transformed from simple text form to participatory platform for people to use as sources for viewing ideas, updating news and exchanging comments etc. In many ways, I feel it is similarly to other forms of media like YouTube or Facebook, all of these have the similar functions and most importantly, they provide me the opportunity to become either a creator or reader while interacting with others. The first thing I like is when creating my own blog, I can freely organize and decorate the profile or front page, so for my BAPP blog I chose the template in pink with patterns and added one of my favorite prosthetics make-up image as the background. All the designs in the template indicate my specialism and I think viewers can firstly get a sense of what the world I belong to. It is very interesting to see other people’s blogs, probably not view the words first and just have a look of the profile designs; you will notice the similarities and differences. In the BAPP group, most of people I know are from the dancing background and they have quite similarly tastes and organizations for their profiles, without looking the words you will have a rough idea to guess which background they come from. There is one more thing I like blogs is that people can control what they write and generally there is no one editing, judging and deciding on your content which provides spaces and freedom on thoughts and there is no right or wrong for publishing. It is more like another world for me, both private and worldwide.

Talking so far, back to the question why web 2.0 is not only well suited for learning but also for communication. Generally speaking, web 2.0 allows users to interact with each other, make formal and informal connections and share. Actually, people use this tool as a network to make communications with a big variety of people, where thousands of people may read and interact with each other over a single blog or one specific YouTube video. We have choices in what to follow, what to look, what to comment and what to download. When I do group projects at university, Facebook has been always the most popular place where we can create communications, have discussions and upload information. We create our own group for updates and images, videos, links and all kinds of researches which we think is relevant to the project. Everyone in the group has the opportunity to participate in the discussion room and make any comments. As well as my make-up side, people who I used to study together and work with, they use this network frequently, upload their new work regularly for people to view, comment and feedback, sometimes they put relevant shows on to link people to participate eg. IMATS (International Make-up Artist Trade Show). As the same as said in the reader, “it is a social system, where we interact, improve the user experience for others by sharing content and then link other people to events, experiences and content.” I think using web 2.0 to communicate can make our lives much easier, they lower the costs of travel, costs of materials and other sources, most importantly is encouraging and supporting collaboration and facilitating debate and discussion.  Gruber (2007) suggests that there are three components of an online system that support collective intelligence and the benefits that might be gained from web 2.0 platform like Facebook. Here I’d like to reveal them again in ways of reviewing the technology I use today and the change it has made to our day-to-day life:

• A social system, supported by computing and communication technology, which

generates self‐service problem solving discussions on the Internet.

   A search engine that is good at finding questions and answers in this body of content.

Google, for example, is very good at finding a message in a public forum in which

someone has asked a question similar to one's query.
  • Intelligent users, who know how to formulate their problems in queries that the

search engine can match to online question/answer pairs. In addition, users help the system learn when they provide intelligent feedback about which query/document

pairs were effective at addressing their problems’