Web 2.0: Collaboration of Billions of People

The reason why Web 2.0 is becoming such a popular phrase in our day and age is because there has never been this many users of the internet all at once since the internet was born. And that number continues to grow. It allows BILLIONS of people to collaborate on projects, connect with each other, consume information, and create all kinds of new "stuff" for people to look at, play with, and remix. The Web really hasn't changed, it's the fact that the way we are using it has been expanded, because, with BILLIONS of people, come TRILLIONS of ideas.
Hence, the reason why our group is working on creating a couple different websites where people can go to find useful tools to help them Consume, Create, and Connect in our digital world.
As I've been working on our Wiki site (Which, by the way is found here: http://backpack2.wikispaces.com/), I have started to become familiar with a bunch of tools. First of all, wikispaces has become a huge tool in bringing this all together. It is really quite an easy way to design a basic website, and I've never worked with ANY web page designing tools, so it has been a lot of fun. Second, I found a cool website that will quickly create a jpeg logo for your website or company, which I used to create our Backpack2.0 logo on the wiki site. Check out the Logo Maker at http://cooltext.com/. Third, I've never worked collaboratively on a project mostly online, and it has been a new, and interesting experience. A lot of E-mails, and a lot of work on Google Documents is bringing this all together. Hopefully this all turns out looking great for the presentations next week! :)

Consume, Create, and connect

Margaret Weddle helped us to learn about Cloud Computing in her Consume lab. Cloud computing refers to what has happened with the internet. When you download a file to the internet, that file goes to the "cloud". When you upload a file from the internet, you are uploading it from the "cloud". Cloud computing is beginning to make Local Networking within companies more and more obsolete. Instead, companies are just using the internet to store files, so that they can be distributed even quicker. A great example of cloud computing is Google Documents. You upload a document to Google, and then that file goes into the "cloud" of information. People, from all over the world, can then upload the file and look at it. It is definitely quite an amazing concept.

Jeff Whitlock helped us learn how to upload videos to YouTube, which neither Margaret or I knew how to do. In order to use what I learned, I quickly loaded a funny video of me getting hit on the head by a branch onto YouTube: Funny Video

I taught our group about BackChannel, what it is, and how we can use it. Here is my PowerPoint for it:
BackChannel PowerPoint

Thanks for the great Digital Literacy Lab Margaret and Jeff! I enjoyed it!