One Year or Less: User-Created Content

User-Created Content

Time-to-adoption Horizon: One Year or Less

From classifying and tagging to creating and uploading, today’s “audience” is very much in control of the content we find online. This active audience is finding new ways to contribute, communicate, and collaborate, using a variety of small and easy tools that put the power to develop and catalog the Internet into the hands of the public. The largest and fastest-growing websites on the Internet are all making use of this approach, which is redefining how we think about the web and how it might be applied to learning.

Overview

A little group of Web 2.0 technologies—tagging and folksonomic tools, social bookmarking sites, and sites that make it easy to contribute ideas and content—is placing the power of media creation and distribution firmly into the hands of “the people formerly known as the audience” (Rosen, 2006). No longer satisfied to be consumers of content, today’s audience creates content as well. Producing, commenting, and classifying are just as important as the more passive tasks of searching, reading, watching, and listening.

Sites like Flickr, Odeo, YouTube, Google Video, and Ourmedia make it easy to find images, videos, and audio clips, but the real value of these sites lies in the way that users can classify, evaluate, and add to the content that is there. Using simple interfaces, visitors can build shared collections of resources, whether they be links, photos, videos, documents, or almost any other kind of media. They can find and comment on items in other people’s lists, sharing not only the resources themselves but information and descriptive details about them.

The emergence of collective wisdom through tagging allows interesting materials to quickly float to the top and be found. Naturally, these materials are not necessarily at all related to learning or creativity, but the process does highlight what people are paying attention to. The challenge for us as educators is to figure out how to harness that power in a learning context.

Tasks that were difficult to do in the past—or that resulted in private collections on an individual computer—can now be done with a few clicks of the mouse, on a shared site where others can see and benefit from them. The tools that make this possible are built from the ground up to enhance collaboration, and they are compatible with everything that we already use. Many are accessible via a web browser; even those that are run locally often take advantage of the browser’s always-available interface.

Pervasive use of these tools is already in evidence among students, and this will only grow in the coming months. The social aspects of these audience- centered technologies, firmly established as powerful tools for creative expression, offer great potential to build community in the context of teaching and learning as well. Nonetheless, we face a significant challenge as we seek to marshal these techniques in the service of education, as this aspect of the new web turns the traditional view of what a website should be on its head.

Relevance for Teaching, Learning, and Creative Expression

Sites that allow easy upload of images, video, audio, and other media also provide students with a low- cost, low-risk means to publish their work as they develop their skills. Comparing their own work to that of others can give students a valuable perspective on their own abilities and inspire them to try new ideas or techniques.

Another value of these tools for education may lie in their ability to connect people and facilitate work without the need to consult a central technology support center. Researchers, project groups, and study groups can select only the tools that they need and set them up on their own, often simply by agreeing to use one particular tool or another or creating “friends” lists with services they already employ. Inter-institutional collaboration has become more common, and these tools support the kinds of work that happens at a distance. These tools also lend themselves to classroom applications, providing a space where work begun in the classroom can be seamlessly carried on outside of class.

Yet another important aspect of these tools is their accessibility. Many are free and require nothing more than a web browser to use; interfaces are simple and similar to others we are already familiar with. Sites that allow users to upload content—even to edit it online—make it possible to work from any computer with an Internet connection, and for multiple users to access, view, and work on the same files. Issues of file format, operating system compatibility, disk storage space, and versioning, all of which can stand in the way of productive collaborative work at a distance, disappear when using server-based shared editing spaces.

A sampling of applications of user-created content across disciplines includes the following:

• Create collaborative, student-authored resources. These tools allow (and encourage) shared responsibility for development of course resources, links, and materials. Colleagues can cross institutional boundaries to collaborate on projects and research. Courses from chemistry to literature are already using tools like del.icio.us to create and share reference libraries of online articles, tools, and other resources.
• Enable asynchronous public feedback on assignments. Photography students at Rowan University use Flickr to post, organize, share, and critique their colleagues’ work for each assignment. The professor provides feedback on the site to each student for each assignment, and an in-class critique brings the discussion into the classroom.
• Give voice to communities and encourage idea sharing. Invite your audience to share what they already know, as the leaders of a workshop at Wesleyan College did. Participants—and the community at large—were invited to tag relevant examples for inclusion in a del.icio.us list of applications of Web 2.0 technologies in categories including social bookmarking, podcasting, wikis, and blogging.

Examples of User-Created Content

The following links provide examples of user-created content applications.

• eTeC 40 - Text Technologies (UBC)
  The masters-level course Text Technologies: The Changing Spaces of Reading and Writing at the University of British Columbia uses a course blog that includes this list of resources, collaboratively built with social bookmarking tools.
• PennTags
  PennTags allows the University of Pennsylvania community to identify and organize web resources, journal articles, and online catalog content.
• uth TV
  Pronounced “Youth TV,” this is an online community of young people sharing original works of video, audio, and other media.
• Zotero
  Developed by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, Zotero is a free, open source research tool that enables scholars to gather, annotate, organize, and share references via a web browser, and also provides export in standard citation formats.

For Further Reading

The following articles and resources are recommended for those who wish to learn more about user-created content.

• Folksonomies: Tidying up Tags?   (Marieke Guy and Emma Tonkin, D-Lib Magazine, January 2006) This paper looks at what makes folksonomies work.
• The People formerly Known as the audience  (Jay Rosen, PressThink, June 27, 2006) This “statement” from the people formerly known as the audience to the media industry describes the new audience and what they want—control of content.
• Social Bookmarking: Mark it, Manage it, Share it  (Mary Beth Lakin, American Council on Education Website, June 2, 2006) This brief article describes social bookmarking and its implications for publishing, research, and education.
• Time’s Person of the Year: You (Lev Grossman, Time, December 13, 2006) The entire web population shares in this year’s recognition by Time Magazine, citing the rise of user-generated content.
• Using Social Software to Teach Social Software  (Ulises Mejias, Innovate, June/July 2006) This article shares results of a graduate class on social software at Columbia University where students explored the field by using the tools and examines larger pedagogical implications for education. Requires free registration to access full text.
• Web’s Second Phase Puts Users in Control (Steve O’Hear, The Guardian, June 20, 2006) This brief article discusses several web-based tools and describes potential applications to education.
• del.icio.us: User-Created Content  (Horizon Project Advisory Board and Friends, 2006) Follow this link to find additional resources tagged for this topic and this edition of the Horizon Report. To add to this list, simply tag resources with “hz07” and “user_content” when you save them to del.icio.us.