Developing a Web 2.0-based system with user-authored content for community use and teacher education

This will be one of my main resources. There are quite a few quotes from this resource that support community and user-based online help. From this single source, I have created a list of mandatory elements that are missing from traditional online help:

Missing and Needed in Traditional Corporate Online Help

1.    Read/write

2.    Growable site, remains up to date with ever changing data

3.    Ability to harness community

4.    Community made, community owned

5.    Where learners can talk back to the material and to each other

6.    Where learners can express themselves

7.    Shared files

8.    Social redistribution

9.    Intelligence generated collaboratively within discourse communities

10. Accomplished intelligence vs possessed intelligence

“Distributed cognitions theory follows from the philosophy of social constructivism and

proposes that ‘‘knowledge is commonly socially constructed, through collaborative efforts

toward shared objectives…’’ (Pea 1997, p. 48).”

According to this resource, Web 2.0 was made for gathering community intelligence. The author points to users with disabilities as an example of someone with a discourse community who would engage in creating and using community intelligence.

In addition, this resource points to how learners and educators can work together to create online content. “In short, everyone together is smarter and more accurate than any single person.”

This explodes my original, now simple-seeming theory that people are turning to the “chaos of the web” rather than the online help. There is much more going on here. The collective body creates a better knowledgebase than one person or one company acting alone. Perhaps Microsoft created Windows 7 but the user community together as a body is smarter than the creator when it comes to using the software and solving issues that it creates.

Cifuentes, Lauren, Amy Sharp, Sanser Bulu, Mike Benz, and Laura Stough. 2010. "Developing a Web 2.0-based system with user-authored content for community use and teacher education." Educational Technology Research & Development 58, no. 4: 377-398. Academic Search Premier, EBSCOhost (accessed September 18, 2010).