Web Authoring: Web2.0 (Collaborative Technologies)
What’s web 2.0?
There are many descriptions of what ‘web2.0’ means, but at its simplest it amounts to websites that you
can read and write to - websites that depend on user interaction rather than passivity. This user
interaction is usually based around uploading information through the web and by this means encouraging
use, comment and relationship forming. The essential points of this are:
• interaction is through the web as a platform
• continuing and regular uploads of information of some sort
• that content is available for use and/or comment
• participation is key
• trust is essential
This exact definition raises questions – Tim Berners-Lee would say (and probably has said) that this is what
was intended all along, but it didn’t actually happen like that. There are opportunities for more
interaction (some of which were there before the term was thought of), often available to you free of
charge and effort (except for a little exploratory urge and providing the content).
Why collaborative?
The reason I labelled this as ‘collaborative’ rather than ‘social networking’ is to encourage a wider view
of what is possible and available. It is a good exercise to explore the potential of repurposing tools for use
in a group of like-minded users or those who have a shared goal, whether they are together on a course or
conference, researchers in a particular topic area, a number of people applying for a grant together, cycling enthusiasts, or any combination.
You need to be aware of a few health warnings. There are free services available but they may be ephemeral – it is worth assembling a toolset of services that you have looked at and, depending on the group’s needs and abilities, are happy to recommend. New services will appear and established ones
Web2.0 (Collaborative Technologies) – Overview 2disappear, either because they have been bought up, die, or the developers lose interest. There is also apotential for issues concerning rights (copyright and IPR), privacy and possible plagiarism, especially if youare using free tools outside the University network. This shouldn’t put you off, but you do have to beaware that they may be risks – attached is a handy (if exhaustive) draft document from EdinburghUniversity.
Things to consider about your collaboration group:
• what group services do they need – email, file storage, collaborative editing of documents or spreadsheets, sharing presentations, mapping, images (still, video, diagrams)?
• what are their technical abilities (or what is it safe to assume) and do they all agree on wanting a
collaborative site?
• do any of the members of the group have special needs?
• do they need their collaboration to be private – are they all within the University?
• will they need informing when updates have been done by others?
• what is the result of the collaboration going to be?
• how is the result going to be made available, and how long-term does the collaborative site need to
be?
• do you want the site to be indexed and be found by the world?
• does the information need to be backed up or stored elsewhere after the collaboration has finished?
• would the group find it difficult to change service during the life of the collaboration?
• how much risk are they willing (or able) to take?
If you have to try and support a very diverse group for collaboration, it may be useful for you to look at OpenID, which is also supported in some open source software packages, such as Elgg, Drupal and Mediawiki (see Wikipedia article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenID and http://openid.net/)
Categories of collaborative tools
• Wikis
• Blogging tools or hosted sites
• ‘Microblogging’
• Virtual community sites/forums
• E-learning sites
• Sharing sites and materials – photos, video, slides
• RSS feeds
• Sites for groups
Wikis
Wikis allow multiple users a true web-based collaborative interface to content – the wiki software allows for generation of and changes to pages, and adding links between them. It keeps a record of the changes on a page and allows for backtracking of changes and locking pages so changes are no longer possible.
Wikis can particularly suit technical, IT and support uses, as they encourage 'dumping' of knowledge in a simple way.
Typically interaction with the web page is with a widget editor that has a built-in shorthand mark up system, which does not suit everyone (some can also accommodate xhtml input directly). Since a wiki is essentially a very flat database, a disadvantage can be lack of structure and there can also be difficulty extracting formatted content, as well as issues of defacement and lack of trust. Limiting access for reading and/or editing to a known group can answer trust/security questions.
Web2.0 (Collaborative Technologies) – Overview 3
A large number of wiki software packages are available for download, with comparisons available via for instance http://www.wikimatrix.org/. There are many free services that can be set up for group use, such as http://www.wikispaces.com/, http://pbwiki.com/ (which has specific help for educations users
http://pbwiki.com/education.wiki), or wetpaint (http://www.wetpaint.com/).
The Computing Service host a managed wiki service (based on Mediawiki), which provides Raven and group authentication (on a read/write basis for all users) – contact wiki-support@ucs.cam.ac.uk for more information – the wiki name will appear as https://wiki.csx.cam.ac.uk/wikiname (redirecting from
(http://wiki.csx.cam.ac.uk/wikiname).
Several technical users have looked at the wiki as an ideal way to have direct input to web pages and have developed tools for this re-purposing. PHP wiki processor (http://www.netassistant.
de/wiki/static/StartPage.html) is a tool that makes the wiki act as a content management system by producing static pages, and there are others that are similar.
Blogs
A blog has a write-in design similar to a wiki, but the structure is for articles, which are listed in different ways – by time of publishing and categorised by keyword. Rss feeds are an integral part of the blog publishing process, and the feeds can mirror the categorisation of the content (see
http://csnews.csx.cam.ac.uk/ as an example). Blogs can be ideal for collaboration, especially when there is a need for different strands of content - all effective collaboration needs a regular and frequent addition of content, and the blog is a straightforward way of encouraging that. Essentially it can be used
as:
• a collecting point for content (a single blog can have multiple authors and have comments enabled
so that users can interact)
• it makes an rss feed available, effectively promoting the content
• and if the audience is wider, social bookmarking such as technorati and del.icio.us can be used to promote the new content and allow it to be found, and google pinging
(http://www.google.com/help/blogsearch/about_pinging.html) to get new blog entries indexed quickly.
The approach to content dissemination must depend upon how wide the collaboration is.
A useful diagram of some uses of blogs in education is at http://www.edtechpost.ca/gems/matrix2.gif – although this is for pedagogical use rather than for, say dissemination of other information.
Many different types of blog are available, for instance (blogger (hosted) - https://www.blogger.com/:
Wordpress (downloadable or hosted) - http://wordpress.org/: typepad (hosted and charged for:
http://www.typepad.com/). Some are designed to provide a hosted blog environment, with open source software such as Wordpress multiuser (http://mu.wordpress.org/) , or Roller
(http://rollerweblogger.org/project/category/About), or commercial, such as Movabletype
(http://moveabletype.org/). There are also more specialist blogs such as typo (http://typosphere.org/), for use with rubyonrails.
Typically, blogs (particularly personal blogs) will also contain links to other blogs. If you want to promote to a group the reading of several blogs, or keep track yourself, you could use a tool such as blogbridge
(http://www.blogbridge.com/) to assemble your own collection and keep track of new entries – this can also be done by keeping track of the rss feeds out of the blogs.
Blogs can also be used more broadly for publishing a website (see http://manila.userland.com/ but other
blogging tools can be used for instance see http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2006/04/20/fromweblog- to-cms.html for how to use Wordpress in this way).
Searching blogs
Because blog entries change quickly, to keep up with current information you will need to use something other than Google (even with bloggers using Google pinging). The Google view of blogs will be for the slightly longer term informational articles that you’ll want to go back to. There are blog searching tools such as the Google blog search (http://blogsearch.google.com/) and readers such as
http://www.google.com/reader/
Web2.0 (Collaborative Technologies) – Overview 4
Microblogging
Twitter (http://twitter.com/) can be used for sending small comments between a group – see
http://www.caroline-middlebrook.com/blog/twitter-guide/ for details of how to use it and why it might
be useful – perhaps useful for quick responses and questions from a remote group in a conference setting
(as recently happened at a Google press conference) ?
Chat or instant messaging
You can set up a chat group by using gabbly (http://gabbly.com/) and have instant messaging – this could be useful to chat between members of an audience at a conference, or with a remote group.
Virtual community sites
For most collaborative ventures, a virtual community would be overkill, requiring far too much time, effort and expertise to set up. Hosted community sites such as Livejournal (http://www.livejournal.com/) and The Well (http://www.well.com/) have been available for many years, although they have changed with the times. Originally they came about as a forum for sharing ideas and thoughts – perhaps in the first instance providing social interaction for those working at home, the geographically isolated, and technical loners. Their purpose was not for self-promotion but for providing more interaction than, say, usenet news groups, which were popular at that time. Today they serve a similar purpose – The Well sticks more closely to the older format, wheras Livejournal has diverted more into personal blogging. Neither can be used for a small group.
Using downloadable open source software such as Plone (http://plone.org/) and Drupal
(http://drupal.org/), along with available skill and hardware, you could set up tailored local sites for managing community interaction for a group. Don’t underestimate the skills involved here – OK if you have a technical person up for the job, but otherwise not. Apart from publishing web pages, such software includes extensive collaboration and e-learning tools. Elgg (http://elgg.org/) is another downloadable open source social networking software package, the difference being that it was designed especially for education – for an example of an Elgg-run site (being used for blogging purposes) and an appropriate blog entry see https://elgg.leeds.ac.uk/ or