Jill: The most obvious examples are Digging for the Truth with Josh Bernstein; Engineering An Empire with Peter Weller and Modern Marvels on The History Channel. However, the most purely academic show is an academic class: Bravo's Actors Studio at the New School in New York City. I found these examples when conducting my research and utilized the model for my study. -----Original Message----- From: air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org [mailto:air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org] On Behalf Of Jill Walker Sent: Tuesday, February 13, 2007 10:12 AM To: air-l@listserv.aoir.org Subject: Re: [Air-l] Web 2.0 - "the machine is us?" I used this video to start my class on blogging last week - and yes, it worked very well as a discussion-starter. I think one of the most encouraging things about this video is that it's made by an academic - Michael Wesch is an Associate Professor of anthropology and is doing research on "digital anthropology". He said he was writing a conference paper and felt that it would be so much more obvious to use the medium to express the ideas - and certainly that was a great way of getting some of these ideas out there. The video's been the most linked-to video (according to technorati.com) for the past week (over 5000 blogs link to it), it's the most viewed this month on YouTube's science and technology category and has nearly a million views. That's pretty awesome for an academic presentation of any kind! It's also an example of a presentation that performs that which it's talking about - performative research, if you like. And while there are clearly many things not dealt with in the video (it's only 4 and a half minutes long) it grapples with some major issues - just the claims and counterclaims about what paper permits as a medium does are wonderful. Does anyone know of other examples of academics who've made things online like this that actually do have some academic content and that have become wildly popular? Jill ---- Jill Walker Associate Professor, Dept of Humanistic Informatics, University of Bergen, Norway http://jilltxt.net
Wesch does an excellent job in a brief presentation of providing a tentative definition of 'Web 2.0' and hinting at its possible impacts.
He does not attempt to provide a clear explanation of the ways in which Web 2.0 is distinctly different from 'social software' that has been around on the Internet since the beginning (Usenet, mailing lists, collaboratively authored FAQs etc) nor does he discuss the implications of the fact that Web 2.0 users are still a minority of users and active Web 2.0 contribution is largely the work of a still smaller minority (something I recently posted about in more detail on the Media@LSE weblog here):
http://groupblog.workasone.net/archives/2007/02/overstating-the- significance-of-web-20/
But of course a 5 minute video is not a paper so that would be too much to expect - the video would make an excellent starting point for discussion of these issues in a classroom.
--- David Brake, Doctoral Student in Media and Communications, London School of Economics & Political Science <http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/media@lse/study/ mPhilPhDMediaAndCommunications.htm> Also see http://davidbrake.org/ (home page), http://blog.org/ (personal weblog) and http://get.to/lseblog (academic groupblog) Author of Dealing With E-Mail - <http://davidbrake.org/ dealingwithemail/> callto://DavidBrake (Skype.com's Instant Messenger and net phone)
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