Web base 2.0 An Editorial

I have benefitted tremendously from the experience of going through twenty-three things dealing with Web base 2.0. For one thing, I never fully realized the raison d'etre for it and now I have a greater understanding of what it is all about and in the process I have also developed an better understanding of who we are as a society as a result of the internet and how we have changed and where our emphasis lies today. When the internet was made available to the general public, it was my understanding that it was the proverbial information highway where one could go and do academic research in any field. E-mail was also introduced where one could contact another person. It was fairly milk toast and pablum . However, since the advent of the internet we have become far more sophisticated and advanced. We have shifted our emphasis and in addition to e-mail, we are now blogging, googling, twittering and textmessaging; and we've moved from googling for directions to get somewhere to GSP's that now tell us orally when to turn on a particular street or they provide grapics of what street to turn on or which lane to take on the interstate so that we arrive at our destination with only a modicum of hassle and without having to stop and ask for directions. We have also progressed to ipods and social networking sites such as FaceBook and MySpace that provide us with instant updates on other people. We no longer have to wait for a paperback edition of a best seller to come out; we only have to grab the ebook. In addition, we download movies, songs, and news. Through the advent of Facebook and MySpace, among others, we can now "unfriend" people; we can access other people's files and read them and we no longer go to coffee shops just for coffee. The one thing that all of these advancements have in common is connectivity where people are not necessarily looking for information along the information highway solo but they are looking to gain this information by establishing contact with other people in a cooperative effort to expand our effectiveness as educators.
In a sense then, it is people reaching out to other people and that is what web base 2.0 is all about. It is people reaching out to connect with other people who share common interests and expertise and as a result new information is shared, altered, extended, expanded and re-developed. Academic research, for example, is no longer an isolated, single person engaged in research in the bowels of some library or sitting in front of a computer squirreled away in a far dark corner of Calcutta, but it has become, in a sense, a collaborative effort by a group of people who are willing to share their expertise and the fruits of their own research. Information that is exchanged is immediate, instant, and "in the now moment." What makes Web 2.0 exciting is that now there has developed a global collabortive effort that expands intellectual horizons in education. The net result is that Web base 2.0 has added a new dimension to the educational process because it has given it an even greater humanistic approach to education as teachers are no longer isolated in their own efforts;they have joined hands across borders for a more universal educational experience. Students are the benefactors of this effort, and they also join in this same process as well. While their own learning experience is enhanced, they learn the entire fundamentals of Web base 2.0 and they carry that knowledge with them into the world of tomorrow. They learn not just the importance of collaborative efforts on a single project but also the importance of connectivity. When someone understands this idea clearly as a Paradigm Shift, then he will understand the diminishing role of "I" or "me" and realize a totally different picture as he morphs into a world of "we" and "us."