Just when I thought the whole technology thing had been put back in its place Web2 comes along. Well. It did not just arrive it has been leaping and bounding out of the early versions of blogs n wikis n podcasts so that it now, by most measures is a serious component in the digital online ecology. I like the notion of ecology because it avoids silly notions like the death of print. What happens in an ecosystem (if my ancient handle on Biology is still valid) is that the system adjusts to new beasties or plants or changed conditions.

I need to write a lot more about Web2 and Ed2?. I'm taking a paper to AARE, if I get it written in which I want to argue that unlike any other computing development over the past thirty years, this one is seriously significant. Having said that, I am equally convinced that formal education systems will likely drop the ball (again), largely because of the heavily entrenched ways of doing things. But, and this is the interesting thing about Web2 activity. There are now serious and large new players in the business of creating, mixing, re-mixing, re-arranging, tweaking, combining "knowledge". This is all about knowledge not perhaps as it is conventionally understood but nevertheless about knowledge. An intriguing podcast by David Weinberger asks the provocative question: What's up with knowledge. While the interest of the Berkman Centre, from which this podcast originates is the law, this informal discussion of a forthcoming book is insightful and useful in terms of thinking the stuff that the KPS agenda has glibly traded in, knowledge, for some time. To quote from the blurb on the page:

He says, "The comedian Jon Stewart has become a trusted journalist. Wikipedia is in many instances more reliable and up-to-date than traditional encyclopedias. Web sites let social networks put together their own front pages, ignoring the efforts of the highly trained members of newspaper editorial boards. So, what is up with knowledge?"

"It's by no means the end of days for knowledge," he says, "but it's no longer limited by the physical ways we've had to manage it in the past." Further, he says, as a culture we are hard at work on building an infrastructure of meaning and understanding.

There is a large amount of discussion about these and related ideas that span a large number of blogs. What is interesting is that apart from the usual "apply it" response of schools and universities there is, apart from stuff coming out of MIT and the Berkman Centre at Harvard there appears to be not a lot else on a significant scale thinking about this and working on these issues "out there". I may be wrong.