It's not splooge, it's web 2.0!

Well, last night’s class was a lot of fun. But when isn’t it? I mean, my fellow students totally rock. We feed off each other and in a good way (we’re not co-cannibals, we’re co-conspirators).

There were a couple of things in our reading (pdf) and our class discussions that came up that really hit home for me. One thing, in particular, was about the reading we did and the concept of “create, communicate, collaborate.” I found validation in the section Technology in Education: Looking at Fiction to Find Real Possibilities. Not just in my thoughts that the arts and the sciences feed off each other, but in that web 2.0 is about user-generated content.

Ok, now that I’ve repeated myself. I will go further. One of the hurdles that I've had to get over is that I used to think of blogs as internet splooge. I thought that blogs were a bunch of people mentally masturbating and that I needed to keep myself clean by staying clear of them.

As the world has transitioned from web 1.0 to web 2.0, my analogy grew to see that there are internet voyeurs and internet exhibitionists. Hey, man, that's fine. But bloggers were the consummate exhibitionists. By nature I am a voyeur--that is, I am a lurker.

Over time, as the blogosphere grew, I found blogs that I really liked--my opinion of them grew and the splooge analaogy diminished. Yet I could still passively consume them (i.e., be a voyeur).

Well, last week I felt like I got caught. No. “Busted” would be a more appropriate word. I got busted, and my voyeurism days are over.

During class discussion, Dr. Foreman mentioned that people often read without commenting. Jeff, on the other hand, protested that he expected more comments. During class, I cringed about this, so I commented on his post (during class). I apologized that I hadn’t said it, but my comment said that I thought it was funny and relevant. He moderates his posts and the emails he gets automatically send his phone a text, so when he got a text he was prompted to look. Of course, he related this experience to the class and we all had a good laugh. Web 2.o meets F2F. It was a good example of how all this technology can still be used during class and not be off-topic or irrelevant.

And it’s not splooge.

This is a great segue to my next topic. I'm glad that our reading talks about "user-generated content." Yes. Web 2.0 is about user-generated content. Jeff generated content; I generated content in response. But when it comes to education, you have to think about this when you think about web 2.0--how do you use it for education?

You can’t just splooge web 2.0 all over people--you have to think of it as a tool. In what instances will you be able to use this tool in order to best generate understanding about information? In what instance do you think this will transform information to knowledge? How will these tools instill not only knowledge but wisdom?

What do you think?