(Note: Cross-posted at The Pulse) When I think about the potential effects of the Read/Write Web on education I’m continually drawn to watching the way things are playing out outside of our focus, specifically in journalism, music, business and politics. In each of those arenas, the disruption that these changes (i.e. the easy creation and publishing of content) has been and continues to be great. You need look no further than the cell phone captured execution of Saddam Hussein to know that we are entering what will no doubt be an extremely interesting (to put it mildly) period that will push our thinking about privacy, communication, literacy and learning. Newspapers are struggling to navigate a world where we can all be journalists. Musicians are more and more going outside of the traditional steps to stardom, eliminating the middlemen and counting on the viral nature of the Web to find success. John Edwards, like him or not, recently announced his candidacy for president on YouTube. In case after case, the traditional models that have been increasingly used to lock down ideas and content are being challenged by a public that is becoming drunk with the power of publishing.

And so I often wonder how long it will take before our traditional concepts of schooling will be also be significantly challenged by the shifts that a more co-operative rather than competitive Web environment is delivering. One obvious place where the disruption is especially transparent is the explosion of “open content” educational materials that are coming online every day. While the most obvious is the MIT OpenCourseWare initiative, which is providing the materials for over 1,600 courses free online, there are literally millions of pieces of valuable, solid content online that cobbled together could do a great job of replacing much of what we currently teach in schools.

In a presentation last fall, Todd Richmond, a fellow at the USC Annenberg Center and the Center for Creative Technologies at USC, said that because of technologies that allow students to view powerful content online and then remix or reflect on that material by publishing their own reactions back to the world, “the previously strictly hierarchical relationships between teacher and learner are changing.” Richmond asks “How do motivated learners and skilled teachers make use of open educational resources to best achieve their aims?”

That is an important question for all of us in a world where there may be better content and better teachers outside of our classrooms that we can connect to for the benefit of our students’ learning. And it forces us to think disruptively about our traditional view of learning and teaching. As District Administration publisher Dan Kinnaman says in the latest issue:

An alarming reality for K12: Despite the radical transformation of data storage and information access, there has been no associated transformation of K12 education. Alarmingly, there may be no sector of society where technology has had less impact. That’s because K12 education persists in operating on the premise that to have school, you must physically co-locate teachers, students and curriculum materials. Teachers and students are assigned to stand-alone, self-contained school buildings that house paltry collections of mostly outdated curriculum materials. With rare exceptions, digital technologies and interactive communications are still largely peripheral to the primary activities of the typical school day. The premise that co-location is required is invalid, and we need to stop spending inordinate amounts of time, energy and money to maintain it as our fundamental operational structure.

That’s the disruption that I think about when trying to peer into the future. As more and more learning, powerful, passion-based learning becomes available outside the classroom, will the “perfect storm” (as Richmond calls it) for education finally arrive, forcing us, finally, to consider some radical re-envisioning of our classrooms?

Technorati Tags: education, learning

I came across this post from Pat Aroune in Western NY who has been diving head first into Read/Write Web tools with his students:

About one month ago, I asked five students to participate in an online experiment utilizing Skype and an online interactive whiteboard called Vyew. Vyew is a free, always on collaboration and web conferencing site that allows individuals real-time desktop sharing and capturing. I met with this small group of students, and we began what was essentially on online tutoring session for an upcoming essay. We did nothing that had not been done during the course of a classroom session, except we were all in our individual homes, and it was 8:30 p.m.. I began to sense, over the course of that hour long session, a wave of energy and enthusiasm from the participants. One month later, this concept of online collaboration has taken on a life of is own. Just last night,twenty sophomores from my A.P. European History classes, met online and did a Skype – Vyew session in preparation for an essay exam today. The remarkable thing is, I was not even a part of it. Individual initiative got last night’s conference off the ground. More power to the students!

You might want to check out the reflections of some of his students on another post as well.

Almost as cool is that Pat’s superintendent Neil Rochelle is blogging about his efforts to bring the tools into the school as well. And this post reflects the type of approach that I’ve been thinking and writing about more and more lately. It’s his recap of a monthly Parent and Student Cabinet meeting where they are talking about the Read/Write Web and it’s use in his school. The result:

Students that have been involved in blogging and social bookmarking love the use of these tools that are being made available and integrated into their instruction. Their chief “complaint”….they are overwhelmed! Because we have attracted teachers to the use of these tools in “pockets” across the district, the same teachers are teaching the content as well as the “how tos” for using the technology. Students feel that they need to learn the newest technology in another class BEFORE using it in these selected classes. A point well taken and one that I will be giving much thought to. Consensus however is they love the approach. They are motivated by on-line collaboration such as internet conferencing such as Skype and video conferencing. Before this year, MySpace was a close as they came to social networking. Now they see an educational value.

It reminds me that kids are overwhelmed too, that they don’t know all of this, that we still have a great opportunity to lead and model appropriate and effective uses, and to learn from each other and our students. Pat and Neil are taking their school in a much different direction, and it’s pretty exciting to watch.

Just some feel good for the holiday…any other stories to share?

Another article that’s got me all fired up today is this CNET review of a John Seeley Brown speech at MIT last Friday. As Clarence points out, Brown affirms much of what we as a community has been saying about the types of changes the Web is bringing about and what it means for our practice and pedagogy. Clarence pulls some of the best quotes, but here is one that really resonates for me:

In particular, he praised situations where students who are passionate about specific topics study in groups and participate in online communities.

To me, this is the one biggest advantages of the Read/Write Web, the ability to connect to others who are passionate about whatever it is that you want to learn. How rare is it to have that happen in physical space, where everyone in the room is ready and excited to learn?

As Brown points out, for educators to really take advantage of the potential of the Internet, we need to rethink our practice. And, I think, the best way to do that is to get involved in “passion based learning” ourselves, much like what has occurred in my practice since I started blogging and connection those many moons ago. That may mean giving up something else. It may mean making a choice between something we currently do, say reading the newspaper, for something new, like reading the aggregator. But we have to find ways to do it, because our current practice will just not pass muster much longer.

technorati tags:learning, teaching, education

Today was one of those days that it felt like there was a subtle shift in the discussion about the effects the Read/Write Web is having on education. I spent about three hours with around 30 or so technology leaders from the Lower Hudson (NY) region, and my talk and the ensuing discussion felt less about tools and more about learning, our students learning and our own. (The session was live-blogged, btw.) And it felt more like a conversation about systems rather than blogs or wikis or podcasts. How will systems be impacted, and how will systems need to change to support what seems to be coming? Sure, there were questions about safety. But this was more of a “how do we make this happen?” session rather than “here’s about 50 reasons why we can’t” one.

Now this was a pretty heady group to begin with. There were people in the audience whose schools were getting rid of AP courses, and others whose students and teachers were holding classes in Second Life. These are by and large connected schools with connected kids, and many of them have traveled much farther down the road than most. And there was a palpable “can do” feel in the room, despite the concerns that were brought up. It was pretty inspiring, if I do say.

I wonder if maybe, and it’s a big MAYBE, we’re nearing another level in the conversation. It’s one where we talk about how the realities of the ways in which our kids are already starting to learn outside of school need to be leveraged inside of school. One where we really start to take a look at teachers as learners modeling learning first. And it’s one where people start to recognize that this isn’t about technology as much as it’s about assembling a new vision for their own practice and for their students’ education.

One thing I do know, and I feel a longer post coming on about this. We have to carry this conversation to other audiences. We’re doing a great job of talking to each other, but at some point, we have to find ways to bring it to people who have little to do with educational technology, namely parents, businesspeople, etc. I’ve said this before, but I need to blog less and try to write more for print pubs that have nothing to do with tech. Hmmm…maybe there’s an angle here for Good Housekeeping…

(Photo of Mohonk Mountain House where the session was held by WalkingGeek)

technorati tags:learning, Mohonk, education, Hudson_Valley

If nothing else, this trip has reminded me how much fun it is to work with kids and how I really love to be in an environment where I can be serious and be really silly at the same time. All of the kids that I met this week in Liverpool and Bolton just sparkled about the idea that they could begin to be a part of a more global network of learners (even though the phrasing might have been a bit different.) And yesterday back in Liverpool, we got about twenty more of them up and running with blogs. If you get five minutes or so and could do a quick read of a couple of them and leave comments, I’m sure that would go a long way to helping them sustain their work. (Now before you ask, we reminded them over and over not to use their full names or identify themselves, but obviously, some didn’t listen.) And in an attempt to start capturing more of this in video, here’s a little snippet of one of the kids in the group.

The bad news, if there is any, is that as they were leaving, one of the girls turned back and said “Now I only hope our teachers let us use these…” Now there’s an idea.

technorati tags:students, liverpool, education

So the second best thing about being in Bolton yesterday after the amazing group of Year 6 students that were in attendance was that I got to sit in on an introductory Garage Band workshop that and Joe Moretti, and ADE from the UK was giving. All I can say is: Oh. My. Goodness. Now I need about 30 hours in a day. Amazing, amazing stuff that I’m really looking forward to playing with on my long, 8-hour plane ride back home on Sunday. Joe did a great job of getting the kids and their teachers to start playing, too. And this picture epitomizes the experience…kids engaged, collaborating, pushing ahead of their teachers many of whom were left scratching their heads. I found myself trying to channel into their fearlessness and I found it hard to keep up. As Joe was going through the many ways to create and manipulate the sounds and music, I was trying to jot down some notes along the way. But not the students. They just went after it.

We did some blogging yesterday, too, and another highlight from yesterday’s workshop was an impromptu Skype call with Chris Turek from November Learning to ask a question about the software that Bolton was using to support its network. When I asked if anyone had any questions for Chris, a whole bunch of hands shot up. Where are you from? How big is Texas? How many people are there? Do you own one of those big hats? Too funny. The kids, and the adults, were amazed that I was talking to my computer and having a conversation with someone halfway around the world. Just another connection…

So despite having to do a final workshop today with a group of high school students back in Liverpool, last night I just could not sleep. I’d be surprised if my brain shut off for even a couple of hours. I laid in bed directing the MacBook Movie I should have been making on this trip, catching snippets of the kids, the technologies, the travel. In my fog, it was a great movie. I kept thinking of David’s keynote and Alan Levine’s presentation (coming up next week), how fun and interesting I found them, and how much I’d love to make my own. But here’s my dirty little secret…getting up in front of hundreds of people and delivering a message is something that no longer bothers me, but I still feel horribly shy about going up and talking to people one on one and, even more, capturing it digitally. I really envy those who can do that easily. Another challenge to work through.

Anyway, here’s hoping I get some sleep tonight…

technorati tags:bolton, learning, blogging, GarageBand

…that Jeff Utecht‘s kids in Shanghai are publishing a series of History of Technology videos to YouTube that most American kids probably won’t be able to see?

What’s not surprising is that because they are being uploaded to YouTube, Jeff’s students are starting to understand the reach of what they can do.

We talked about what these numbers meant and that they were producing something that could potentially be seen by millions of people. I then read them the comments that Clarence and David left on my last posting about the videos and more than anything that was what really caught them off guard.

“You mean people are waiting for us to finish this?”

“Canada? I’m from Canada!”

As I looked around the room there was all of a sudden this sense of ‘he’s not joking’. One student completely deleted his work and started over proclaiming, “This isn’t good enough.” I had another student go home that night do more research and then come back Thursday with a 4 page report on the history of Google. We had to have a talk as YouTube videos must be under 10 minutes, and as he recorded his voice we decided that talking faster wasn’t a good solution to fitting all his information in a 10 minute slide. Another student that was finished came over and helped him edit his work decided to cut the years 2001, 2003 out completely and chopping some paragraphs here and there. He didn’t finish his on Thursday so it will be uploaded to the account on Monday. My teaching partner has his students uploading their videos on Friday so you might want to stop by and check those out as well.

These technologies empower students to do good work. As I wrote on Thursday. They become contributors to society and they understand that and live up to that potential. Empower students with information and what them go!

Let your students teach to the world and watch what happens. But if you’re here in America, you’ll probably have to find a way to do it without using the most insanely popular publishing tool out there right now.

technorati tags:youtube, JeffUtecht, video, school20, classroom20, weblogg-ed, education, learning

So my Odeo test during my presentation in Coshocton, Ohio didn’t work as expected yesterday and I’m not sure why. I think I’m going to start doing those “look how easy this is” type examples in some other space from here on out. Time to start a beta Blogger blog…

It was interesting yesterday speaking to about 200 teachers about all these shifts and changes, having an hour just to show them my practice and talk about RSS and del.icio.us and the other tools that have become such a part of my life. And as always, I could see a lot of faces in that thinking hard scrunch. (I could also see a few that would have much rather been getting ready for opening day which is today…) I think one of the most interesting things that I’m finding in this new role is the consistent sense of restrained enthusiasm on the part of teachers. On the one hand, I think many who see these tools being used immediately get imaginative, creative ideas for their classrooms or their own practice. But there is always, always, always this underlying sense that what comes first is the “what about the test?” question. And it’s totally appropriate in an environment where what’s always in front is AYP and making the various standards that are being imposed. That, and the reality that as much as we are immersed in it, the technology still doesn’t work as easily as paper and pen in most parts of this country.

One other interesting note from yesterday…When I got to the school and ran through my presentation, I found much of what I wanted to show was being filtered. The administrative password got me through to everything but Wikipedia, which was coming up with an “adult and/or pornographic content” label. One of the technology specialists in the district jumped through all sorts of hoops to find out that the filtering service had flipped a wrong switch, and by the time I got to it in my live presentation, it was coming through. But the point was clear, once again. Educators are not in control of these decisions, and, as was expressed to me by another teacher, one of the most frustrating things is not being able to allow sites through the filter “on demand,” instead having to go through all sorts of levels to get things unblocked. I think at Coshocton, at least, they are going to start having some serious conversations about how to make this an education issue and not a technology one. They are talking about having some expansive dialogue which would include the entire school community to find a better way to do this. It will be interesting to see how that goes.

technorati tags:education, Coshocton, Wikipedia, filtering, censorship

Thanks to John Bidder for this link to an article in The Age out of Australia, where he recently presented at a conference discussing Web 2.0 tools and their potentials in education. (There’s a concept.) The quote comes from Susan Mann, CEO of the Curriculum Corporation:

“The old concept of curriculum is dead but you can’t tell anyone,” she says. “There are innovative schools and clusters of schools but others are stuck in a time warp.”

And that’s in Australia…people here are even less happy to hear that the concept of curriculum is dead. What will we do with all those tests?

technorati tags:education, curriculum, schools

A few more thought-provoking lines from Henry Jenkins’ new book “Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide.“ It’s been giving me quite a bit to chew on in the 30 or so pages I’ve read. I think he has an amazingly perceptive read on how access to people and ideas change the equation in the classroom. Just for some context, these are all from a chapter titled “Why Heather Can Write” which was expanded from an article published a couple of years ago in the MIT Technology Review. It’s primary focus is on kids turning to fan fiction, in this case, Harry Potter fan fiction. But the larger conclusions are pretty powerful, I think.

First, there is a discussion surrounding Paul Gee’s so-called “affinity spaces” which says that “people learn more, participate more actively, engage more deeply with popular culture than they do with contents of their textbooks” (177).

Affinity spaces offer powerful opportunities for learning, Gee argues, because the are sustained by common endeavors that bridge across differences in age, class, race, gender, and educational level, because people can participate in various ways according to their skills and interests, because they depend on peer-to-peer teaching with the participant constantly motivated to acquire new knowledge or refine his or her existing skills, and because they allow each participant to feel like an expert while tapping the expertise of others.

That resonates so powerfully with the way I reflect on my own practice as a blogger and with this community: constantly motivated to learn because of the connections that I have to the community of learners in this space. And it’s powerful because of the way learning is nurtured. As Jenkins says

In the classroom, scaffolding is provided by the teacher. in a participatory culture, the entire community takes on some responsibility for helping newbies find their way.

I love the language that Jenkins uses as well when talking about the potential effects of the fan fiction world on learning.

What difference will it make, over time, if a growing percentage of young writers begin publishing and getting feedback on their work while they are still in high school? Will they develop their craft more quickly? Will they discover their voices at an earlier age? And what happens when these young writers compare notes, becoming critics, editors, and mentors…As we expand access to mass distribution via the Web, our understanding of what it means to be an author–and what kinds of authority should be ascribed to authors–necessarily shifts.

Our students have a plethora of opportunities to publish right now, and more are opening up each day. (In fact, Barbara Barreda is writing about just such an opportunity in her blog.) When are we at least going to start thinking about the possibility of publishing work instead of just handing it in? I think that’s one of the most powerful shifts this is bringing about in our classrooms. If we don’t start considering the potential of publication soon, we’re going to find ourselves more and more irrelevant. As Jenkins puts it, we now live in a world “where knowledge is shared and where critical activity is ongoing and lifelong.”

Not surprisingly, someone who has just published her first online novel and gotten dozens of letters of comment finds it disappointing to return to the classroom where her work is going to be read only by the teacher and feedback may be very limited.

Finally, Jenkins writes eloquently about the new power our students have in this culture.

They are active participants in these new media landscapes, finding their own voice through their participation in fan communities, asserting their own rights even in the face of powerful entities, and sometimes sneaking behind their parents’ back to do what feels right to them. At the same time, through their participation, these kids are mapping out new strategies for negotiating around and through globalization, intellectual property struggles, and media conglomeration. They are using the Internet to connect with children worldwide and, through that process, finding common interests and forging political alliances…In talking media pedagogies, then, we should no longer imagine this as a process where adults teach and children learn. Rather, we should see it as increasingly a space where children teach one another and where, if they would open their eyes, adults could learn a great deal. (Emphasis mine.)

I just find that to be such a powerful articulation of what’s happening to learning in this new world. And I just don’t think many if any of our schools are really looking through this new lens very clearly yet. How are we supporting these types of connections in our curricula? How are we helping our students to become globally conversant? To what extent are we really handing over the power of these tools and teaching them how to use them well?

Much to think about…

technorati tags:Henry_Jenkins, literacy, fan-fiction, Paul_Gee, education, classroom, learning

From page 170 of Henry Jenkins’ new book “Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide“:

None of us really know how to live in this era of media convergence, collective intelligence and participatory culture. These changes are producing anxieties and uncertainties, even panic, as people imagine a world without gatekeepers and live with the reality of expanding corporate media power.

And…

Just as we would not traditionally assume that someone is literate if they can read but not write, we should not assume that someone possesses media literacy if they can consume but cannot express themselves.

I wonder to what extent he means express themselves publically. I think this is what’s really hard for many educators to get their brain around, and to be honest, I waffle on whether teachers need to be content creators or just have to understand the potential for their students. Some of that ambivalence may be because of the look of fatigue that comes over many people’s faces when I suggest it, and the frequency with which I get asked how I find the time to learn and do all of this. (Answer: I have no life.) But I do think publishing literacy is crucial these days. Not just from the technical aspect of blogging and podcasting, but from the philosophical aspect of sharing and collaboration as well.

I just had a flash of reflection on my own experiences with all of this, that the tools were relatively easy, but the expectations of sharing widely and freely are still issues that I struggle with. Not as much as before, but as recent posts indicate, it’s still there.

And just one more extended quote from the book (page 179) to whet some appetites:

More and more, educators are coming to value the learning that occurs in these informal and recreational spaces, especially as they confront the constraints imposed on learning via educational policies that seemingly value only what can be counted on a standardized test. if children are going to acquire the skills needed to be full participants in their culture, they may well learn these skills through involvement in activities such as editing the newspaper of an imaginary school or teaching one another skills needed to do well in massively multiplayer games or any number of other things that teachers and parents currently regard as trivial pursuits.

I’ll let you read the section on “Rewriting School” yourselves…

technorati tags:Henry_Jenkins, Schoo, culture, education, schools, learning

So I’m not sure I would go so far as to say that I’m “another uninformed sheepie in the flock of society” or a “Ditto-head wannabee,” but Jim O’Hagan makes a valid point when noting that I took the word of Roy Mark in the previous post instead of going to the primary source, the 96-page report issued by the Crimes Against Children Research Center. Ironically, we were having quite a discussion about just this topic yesterday in a workshop which (thankfully) we can continue this morning as I bring up this “teachable moment.” In his comments on the post, Jim deconstructs the survey that the article cited to show, apparently, that the pool of respondents wasn’t quite the most “average” sampling, suggesting, perhaps, that the reality about Internet predators and parental monitoring isn’t quite as rosy as it appears. And he asks, in a world where we have access to primary sources, why didn’t I go there first?

Answer? Time. Laziness. The appearance of a trusted source, though I’ll admit I’ve only read Roy Mark on occasion. In other words, the same excuses our kids will give when their research is not up to par.

A couple of observations here. First, this is the power of the blogosphere to instruct and remind. Despite being taken to task for it, I do appreciate Jim taking the time to do the work I didn’t AND, even more importantly, share the result. Second, in terms of this particular study, even Jim doesn’t go so far to deconstruct the original survey done five years ago to see if the demographics of that study were the same as this one, which if so would seem to indicate that the trends cited are valid. Third, I wonder how I can effectively strike this balance in my own practice. As my time has become less available to reading and blogging, I find it more and more difficult to maintain the practice. So, I don’t dig. The decision then is whether or not I write less often because I haven’t had the time to fully vet a story or idea, to write less deeply and just do more linking, or continue to offer stuff up with half-hearted effort in the hopes that others will edit what I write. To be honest, neither choice feels great. But it’s a more complex issue for me than most, I think for a variety of obvious reasons. Fourth, how and when do we best teach our kids this concept of editing? My seven and nine year old should be learning this…they are not.

In general, I have not been very happy of late with the work I’ve been doing here. And, as I’ve pointed out before when I get this feeling, it’s because I haven’t had the time to read. Something has to give when that happens.

technorati tags:editing, education, teaching, literacy

We really need more articles like this one, don’t we?

“Within schools, social networking sites like MySpace put schools at risk from the legal liabilities of kids posting threatening or defamatory information about their classmates or their teachers,” said Paul Henry, vice president, Strategic Accounts for Secure Computing. “These networking sites have allowed kids to take threatening behavior to the next level — basically allowing kids to become cyberbullies from the comfort of their own home or from a computer in the school lab.”

But wait! There actually is some good news! Look at this column by Roy Mark on Internet.com. Seems things might not be as bad as the election year politicians and for profit businesses are making it out to be. A new Harris poll shows 80% of parents actually monitor their kids’ use of the Internet, even though a minority don’t feel fully up to the task. And over half of parents think Congress should keep out of the issue.

Even better, look at this:

And now for the second report out this week: The number of youths sexually solicited online is actually declining.

Moreover, most solicitation incidents — almost 80 percent — happen on home computers. And fewer than 10 percent happen on a school or library computer.

Funded by the federal government and researched and written by the University of New Hampshire’s Crimes Against Children Research Center, the Online Victimization of Children report states that in 2001, 19percent of children reported unwanted sexual solicitations over the Internet.

Five years later, the number fell to 13 percent.

“Despite the decline in the proportion of youth who received solicitations, however, the number of youth receiving the most dangerous sexual overtures, aggressive solicitations that move, or threaten to move, beyond the Internet into real life, has not declined,” the report states.

Nor has it increased over five years, suggesting the problem is being badly blown out of proportion by vote-hungry lawmakers.

I’m still amazed at how little coverage this has gotten. Still nothing in the major papers about DOPA, and it’s literally on no one’s radar. Oy.

technorati tags:DOPA, education, social, MySpace, fear, politics

With the way things are going (two birthday parties this weekend, off to South Carolina tonight) I myself may never get to read the just-released white paper from Harvard’s Berkman Center titled The Digital Learning Challenge: Obstacles to Educational Uses of Content in the Digital Age A Foundational White Paper. But for now, it’s on my required reading list. I have had the great pleasure to have heard the paper’s principal investigator William Fisher present during my trips to iLaw in years past. As with the others, he has just a brilliant mind, and I’m seriously looking forward to chewing through this at some point.

According to the executive summary, here are the four case studies developed in the paper:

• A plan to use social networking software tohelp new social studies teachers interact and share classroom resources, which confronts copyright problems when teachers incorporate third-party content into their materials;
• The need of film studies professors to bypass encryption on DVDs – likely in violation of federal law – in order to show selected film clips to their students;
• An effort to make a digital database of hard-to-find but important American music available on college campuses, which encountered massive obstacles in the rights clearance process;
• The shortcomings of special statutory provisions intended to benefit public broadcasters, but limited to over-the-air broadcast so that they have become nearly irrelevant as the need to distribute content on multiple digital platforms increases.

This whole copyright/plagiarism issue is something that we are going to have to have many, many conversations about as educators, and this would seem to be fuel for those discussions. Hopefully, I’ll blog more about my reactions shortly.

technorati tags:copyright, education, Berkman, William_Fisher

Maybe just a touch over the top, but CNN is getting on the wave by making “You” the most important person in business at People Who Matter.

Why You Matter: They’ve long said the customer is always right.But they never really meant it. Now they have no choice. You — or rather, the collaborative intelligence of tens of millions of people, the networked you — continually create and filter new forms of content, anointing the useful, the relevant, and the amusing andrejecting the rest.

One shudder…they actually mention Web 3.0…

technorati tags:read_write_web, media