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! :)

A Model for Future Classrooms?

For those of you who read my blog, I mostly do this for an assignment that I have in my History class (Digital Civilization, Honors 202 course at BYU.) We have been studying history from about 1400 AD to the present day, and then linking it to the effect that modern Media and the Internet have changed the world we live in now. It has been a wonderful, and challenging, class to be a part of.
I have also seen it become a model of what classrooms in the future might be like. Our teachers Dr. Gideon Burton and Dr. Daniel Zappala have focused a lot on "Self-Directed Learning". I see this as a direct result of Media Theory. The fact that electronic and mass media are so readily available at our fingertips with television and the internet is changing the very way we learn. Going to college is not the only way we learn anymore. Books are becoming less and less authoritative. The fact is, because information and ideas change so quickly in the world we live in, we need a medium that can keep up, and that is where Self-Directed learning becomes so important. WE have to take the initiative to go out there into the "mass media" that we have available to us, and be able to intelligently search for the wonderful information that is available to us on every topic.
This class has been a great model for what is available to us, and how classrooms in the future might function. As we have learned how to blog, search other blogs, use tools like Diigo, Prezi, and Slideshare, and the many other tools available out there, it has opened my eyes to the world of Education 2.0. The fact is, in today's world, YOU are responsible for your learning. It is not enough just to go to the classroom anymore.

This is one of the major reasons I am in the Digital Scholarship Wiki group. We are trying to make a user friendly website that people can go to to learn about the different tools available to them out there. Hopefully it will be beneficial to all who visit our website when we are finished.

Real life application!!

So, in light of talking about passwords the other day, today I had a very unpleasant surprise. I got on my computer this morning, after a wonderful Worldwide Leadership Training Meeting, and tried to log into my E-mail. What I got instead was a message from Google saying I had had some suspicious activity on my account, and that I needed to type in a phone number for them to send me a verification text message. I did this, and then the account had me change my password. When I got on my Gmail account, I found an interesting E-mail that had been attempted to be sent, that I never sent. It only had a link to a website, and I deleted it immediately, because I'm pretty sure it was something malicious. Luckily Gmail had actually stopped those E-mails from being sent, and had shut down my account. This was why my Gmail was not immediately logging in, and why my blog was down earlier this morning. What it looks like is someone hacked into my E-mail in order to send something scary to my contacts. This was very troublesome, so I took the time this morning to go through and change my passwords on many different websites. Hopefully this won't happen again. :)

It just reaffirmed to me that Dr. Zapala knows what he is talking about, and that it's a good idea to have different passwords, and to change them often. It is frightening what people can do through the internet with malicious intentions, but it is also one of the most wonderful tools we have nowadays. Just be careful out there.

The Technological Frontier: Changing the world

Inspired by Kristen Cardon's post, I found this other YouTube video that talks about human capital and technology merging in the world we live today. In a way, the technological frontier has made it so that human capital is really only "capital" when that "human" understands technology. Therefore, "human capital" is really morphing into "technology capital".

However, I don't think this is absolute. As Walden talked about simplifying things, in many ways, we still want to hold on to the "simple things of life". There are still many people who love to go to an old diner for dinner. Or many who would rather hike a mountain trail then surf online for 6 hours. A lot of people still like simplicity.

But, the internet and technology are revolutionizing the way we do things. Just like frontiers of America revolutionized the way that Americans were and are, and how they acted and act today.

Pioneers still exist today. They are not pushing the limits of civilization, but they are pushing the limits of technology beyond what we think could ever be possible.

Second Life and Romanticism

This blog is in response to Andrew's blog.

Second Life could easily be renamed "'Romantic' Life". The idea of being able to create a world and a "life" for yourself, the individual, with a rejection of many of the boundaries that we have in this world, are fundamentally a Romantic view of existence. Comparing Second Life with the life we live now in reality shows us that Second Life really is a form of radicalism, breaking away from the bonds of this life, and giving you a freedom unlike any other.

This freedom has allowed companies and educational institutions to even create an environment of learning and working that would not be possible within this world, but only within the virtual. The internet really is changing the way we learn, work, play, and even live.

However, I wonder how far this will go. What I'm scared of is ending up in a life depicted in Disney and Pixar's "Wall-E". Watch this clip:




Do you think this could happen?

The Power of Ideas

What an influence one idea can have on the world.

“The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it which obliges every one; and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind who will but consult it that, being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.”

--John Locke “Of Civil Government”

This idea about people having "certain unalienable rights" (US Declaration of Independence) fueled great changes throughout the world, especially the French and American Revolutions. Just watch the videos below to get a quick idea of the influence this one idea had on these two nations:






But it doesn't stop there. The Internet and Protocols have brought these ideas of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to the forefront again. Kristen Cardon wrote a great post about the effect the internet has had on the world, which made me begin to wonder just what kind of effect the internet will continue to have on the world in the future, and if it will change the ways governments are run around the world.

Ramtin Hajimonshi posted views on how the internet is effecting the world, and does a wonderful job speaking about dialog on the internet, and how we can speak with those from all over the world. The internet is spreading ideas like wildfire, and as we have seen from history, ideas change the world. What do you think will happen?

What a Class!

So far, my experience in this Digital Civilization class has been challenging, but very beneficial. There are many things about history that I have never really studied or thought about until I got to this class. I had never heard of Leonardo da Vinci's "The Painter"; or John Milton's "Areopagitica". I had never heard of Thomas Hobbes or his Book "Leviathan". To be honest, history and me have never really gotten along well. However, I think that the topics we are covering in this class are really interesting, and they are able to keep my attention. I love learning about the ideas of those from history, rather than just the dates and facts themselves. I think it is a wonderful way to focus and delve deeply into a very important aspect of the past.

On top of that, I love tying the computing aspects of today into our learning of the past. I think this is truly what history should be about: looking to the past, comparing it with the present, and looking at how the future might be by comparing them. For example, looking at how the Catholic Church regulated the information that people were able to access, and how Martin Luther and others wanted to liberate information to all people was really easy to compare to the Open Software Movement in our day. This class has really opened my eyes to how Computers in our day can be compared to many of the revolutionary thoughts, ideas, and inventions of the past.

As far as the digital literacy goes, I LOVE this aspect. I was really skeptical about it at first. In fact, I was pretty opposed to it. However, it is opening my mind to better ways of connecting with people in order to learn. Recently I've been thinking about how effective this sort of learning and collaborating will be when I'm a math teacher. To be able to connect with other math teachers from all over the world and share ideas will be a HUGE advantage to me in the future. It is also wonderfully helpful in this class. I'm really enjoying Diigo, because it allows me to keep track of the websites I have highlighted, liked, and even commented on. Writing in a blog is also a convenient way to share the information I'm learning, and a wonderful way in which we are able to connect with the other people in our class, and others from all over the world. Blogsearching has become a wonderful tool that I am really beginning to enjoy. It takes me to new ideas and places that I never would have gone to through a search engine like Google. It even sparks new ideas in me that I then want to share on my own blog. For instance, when we were talking about the Printing Press, Ariel made a comment on my post Printing Press=Internet Press?, which then sparked me to write another blog post about books becoming obsolete. (See Books and Printing Becoming Obsolete?) I love the "research-post-comment-gain new ideas-post again" model that is happening in this class. I think it is a wonderful way of collaborating and discussing the things in class. Other tools like Google Documents are also making it wonderfully easy to share the information we gather with the class and with the world in general.

I think this class is fantastic, and the ideas we learn here will be beneficial to all of us for the rest of our lives.

Could EVERYTHING eventually become free?

Well, I'll answer my own question. I think not. The internet has changed the economy of many things related to information. Newspapers have seen a dramatic decline. Most periodicals have moved to publishing online. Things like Facebook, Yahoo, and Google offer many free services. Yes, the economy of the internet is fundamentally different from Adam Smith's view of Capitalism. But, that does not mean that the general trend of the online world will eventually apply to all aspects of life.

There are many services in the world today that are performed by people that cannot be free. It just doesn't work. Even services online offer the "free" tactic to get you into their system, and then they begin to bombard you with "premium" offers that cost money. This is the way a big chunk of Facebook's money is earned, as stated in Fred Wilson's Blog (see Freemium and Freeconomics) Wilson also states this at the end of that same blog:

"The Internet allows an entrrepreneur to enter a market with a free offering because the costs of doing so are not astronomical. And most entrpreneurs who take this approach will maintain an attractive free offering of their basic service forever. But that doesn't mean that everything they offer will be free. That's the whole point of freemium. Free gets you to a place where you can ask to get paid. But if you don't start with free on the Internet, most companies will never get paid."


This is the economy that the internet has created. Most companies online must offer some sort of "free" service or product, but then charge for more of the elite and "cool" gadgets and services that the site has to offer. In fact, when looking at it this way, isn't the internet just following the model of free samples that food companies offer? Isn't the internet just following the model of free cell phones that cellular service providers offer? And maybe, just maybe, the internet is actually more Capitalistic than Chris Anderson makes it out to be.

My Avatar

No, not that avatar. I took some time on www.meez.com and created an avatar, which, in internet and computer terms, refers to a cartoon character online that you create and design in any way you want. Curious as to what the word "Avatar" means, I began to look things up to discover how it applies.

Avatar actually comes from Hinduism, and refers to the descent of a deity to the earth in some incarnate form. (Dictionary.com) Usually the avatar was something other than human, however it could still be human.

Interesting that we use this term to describe another "form" of ourselves in the digital world. But it is not necessarily how we look, but maybe how we believe we would look based on our likes, personalities, features, and wants, etc.

Then, looking at it from the view of all the "Open information" discussion we have been having in class, I wonder if, through Avatars, we will actually lose something in not being able to see the person face to face. Does it taint the information we receive from that person when all we can see is a cartoon version of, well, whoever they want to be?

P.S. You can see my Avatar at the side of this Blog Page.

Learning to Use Diigo

Because of class Tuesday, I decided to do one of my digital literacy labs on Diigo, set up an account, and start using this tool. So far, I have really enjoyed it. It makes doing research on the internet a whole lot easier to organize, and keep track of. I was able to set up a profile, give a little information about myself, and I was able to find Dr. Burton on there, who I am now following. I think this is a great way to share information, and websites that you have discovered, and I can't wait until we get the class Group going on Diigo.

If you would like to start following me, go to Diigo, set up your account, then, in the search box, type in "Kevin Watson" and click "search for Kevin Watson in users". You can then click the follow link, and begin following the pages that I bookmark, highlight, and post sticky notes on. I love this tool!

Getting to know you, getting to know all about you...

I'm Kevin Watson, and I love life! I grew up with a wonderful, loving family, and plenty of good friends. My best friend, Andy, and I have been friends since we were three years old. Growing up together was a huge strength. One of the greatest blessings in my life has been the Gospel. Without it, who knows where I would be. I love my Savior, and I love my Father in Heaven, and I love the guidance and direction of the Holy Ghost. It truly is amazing and wonderful.

I served my mission in the Australia, Sydney South Mission, and loved it thoroughly. For those of you who don't know, Australia is actually quite the melting pot. I was able to interact with a whole heap of different cultures while I was there. (As an example, I think I learned how to say hello in at least 20 different languages.) My mission strengthened me, and I was able to be an instrument in the Lord's hands to bring about at least a little good in people's life there.

Since returning in June 2009, I met my wonderful, beautiful, amazing wife Jenny, and we were married just this past May. I love, love, love, LOVE being married, and would recommend it to anyone who would ask me. Jenny truly is a strength in my life, and I thoroughly enjoy every moment I can spend with her.

I'm currently studying Math Education, and am excited to one day be a teacher. I think this class will be fun, and I'm excited to see how this different look at the past and present will work out.