Announced over the new year, Time’s “Person of the Year” is “You” — that’s also me and everyone. We’re all persons of the year because we’re contributing user-generated content as pro-sumers. The Time edition goes on to profile the aspects of Web 2.0 that have become familiar — YouTube, MySpace, Wikipedia, OhMyNews — and some that aren’t so familiar. For example, I learned that a “mil-blogger” is a US miltary blogger and there are at least 1,200 out there.
Again, relating to the Net Gen and Digital Natives projects, how can we think about user-generated content — which by definition is active, voluntary, and self-directed with intrinsic motivation — in terms of educational settings, which may include externally imposed direction requiring extrinsic motivation?
1 response so far ↓
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billylee
// Feb 1, 2007 at 1:08 am
Interesting conundrum – I think that there is an underlying shift of the push-pull philosophy of educational approaches here. It’s very much like when large corporations try to co-opt ‘grass roots’ spaces or intentionally ‘guerilla’ trends in order to push their products. For example, no company (to my knowledge) has successfully managed to harness the energy and excitement that ‘flashmobbing’ generates, because the very idea of the movement is to empower the (group of) random individual(s).
In the same way, these user-generated content technologies are a lot more about knowledge transfer in a viral sense than traditional pedagogy. And perhaps it’s just a matter of a shift of importance, between official, accredited, regulated learning, and a more freeform, informal approach. I would think that, moving in the circles that we do, we would each know at least one person who is an a(ddi)ctive contributor to Wikipedia, for example.
Sorry, I should have said at the start that I tend to ramble.
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