Humility and the Next Wave

"Though definitions of Web 2.0 vary, the one constant is that Internet users are now content providers rather than content receivers. The top-down approach of the Web we grew up with now has been replaced with users who build information from the bottom up."

The Next Wave Now: Web 2.0 ― Lane B. Mills
Mills, L. B. (2007). The next wave now: Web 2.0. The Education Digest, 73(4), 4-5.

I think I'd most like to focus on the phrase "users who build information from the bottom up" with reference to our discussions through the past three weeks. When you take a course such as the one we've all embarked upon, it is easy to get swept up in the excitement of what we're learning and want to rush out and just do all of it at once. One simple thought occurs to me that should give everyone just a bit of pause, and that is simply humility.

I strongly believe that students who are allowed to engage in student-centered learning, who are allowed to have a major say in what they study and how they study it, and who are allowed to create their own projects that they feel will benefit them the most will never have the benefit of someone looking them dead in the eye and telling them to "get over themselves." Though I don't currently teach, I had the wonderful opportunity to teach journalism at a high school a few years ago. These kids were really great, but they only wanted to write opinion columns, and when I assigned them news articles to write, they couldn't wrap their thoughts around a coherent idea and really couldn't write that well...not even well for high school students. I believe this is because of two reasons: (1) students today are very self-deprecating, and (2) students today think their opinion is just the greatest and that everyone wants to hear it.

Just look at YouTube and Twitter for examples. Young people post all sorts of silly, and sometimes very inappropriate, content on YouTube of themselves without the thought that the rest of the world simply doesn't need to see a young person dancing in their undies, nor do we want to see your video dedicated to running someone else down. Just the same with Twitter...I don't care if you are eating a sandwich, driving across town, or whatever other mundane personal details you can fit into 140 characters.

That being said, Web 2.0 has the ability to launch us into the kind of Eutopian society that sci-fi movies are made of. Dedicated and self-directed learning, valuable and relevant up-to-the-minute communications, and genuine effort in building the most accurate information possible from the bottom up will launch every member in our society into the upper reaches of enlightenment. Students who are taught to responsibly use Web 2.0 technologies and who are gently guided through the ethics of such technologies will lead us all into a society of openess and sharing heretofore unknown in our history.