Curt Bonk's Presentation

The essence Dr. Bonk’s presentation can be summarized by quotes he offered from Bryan Alexander:

“The Web 2.0 relates to microcontent. Such microcontent takes the form of streams of revisions to a Wikipedia document, blog postings and hyperlinking, and status changes in a social networking software space. And once up, this content can be saved, shared, copied, and quoted as well as repurposed for still other uses. In our time-crunched society, it is much easier to start a wiki entry or compose a blog summary of an event, than to write an article or a book. And when posted, there is some immediate sense of personal empowerment or identity.”

This, I think, illustrates both the greatest power of Web 2.0 and its greatest weakness. The power is that everyone has a voice; and the weakness is that everyone has a voice. Critical thinking—the ability to sort the wheat from the chaff—will be a crucial educational skill in years to come.

Also, Alexander’s statement about microcontent is very apt. Everywhere on the web I see the trend to abbreviate words, thoughts, even meaning. That is its greatest threat to scholarship—the tendency to remain on the surface of things. How that tendency will affect higher education is anyone’s guess.

Bonk quoted Alexander further: “How much more broadly will this connective matrix grow under the impact of the openness, ease of entry, and social nature of Web 2.0? How can higher education respond, when it offers a complex, contradictory mix of openness and restriction, public engagement and cloistering?”

How indeed? Perhaps it will bring a much-needed pragmatism, a focus on real-world issues in real-time, rather than the production of ponderous academic tomes with little relevance to the ordinary person. One can only hope. Perhaps, rather, we’ll become a society of intellectual light-weights.