Creative Waves - Collaborative Technologies and Applications for Interactive Information Design - page 42

Collectively, web applications such as YouTube,
Flickr, GoogleMaps, Digg, Facebook, MySpace,
Last.FM and WIkipedia are known (and hyped)
as Web 2.0 applications (O'Reilly, 2005); a term
that describes some of the technical approaches
to their creation, but generally describes the idea
that users and their audience create the content and
form communities around this content, sometimes
known as the 'read/write' or 'living' web.
The very first Omnium project in 1999 (Ben-
nett, 2000) was developed through an awareness
that the landscape of design practice was changing
and that design education was failing to keep in
step with these changes. It is essential to explore
these emerging trends in order to better under-
stand the role of online creative collaboration
within educational settings because our younger
students are the age group that are at the forefront
of this change (Lenhart, Madden, & Hitlin, 2005;
McMillan & Morrison, 2006; Green & Hannon,
2007; Holden, 2007). How this demographic of
young people experience the world will have an
enormous effect on the way we all teach, learn
and work. In fact, the way in which our students
learn is possibly becoming far more important
than what they learn.
The strength of social networks and online com-
munities is that they provide both a way through
the enormous amount of information on the web
as well as creating social bonds and capital. The
collaborative filtering evident in contexts like
Amazon.com and iTunes (“people who bought X
also bought Y”) or recommendations from social
networks like Last.FM are very different from
the paradigm of searching, which is currently the
process generally taught in information literacy
courses in universities and colleges. When you
search you know what you are looking for, you
just need to find it. When you click through recom-
mendations via collaborative filtering you don't
know what you are looking for but find things of
value to your tastes by following the connections
that other people have made, often without real-
ising it. You find what you never knew you were

looking for . This is a very powerful process indeed,
as anyone who has spent a fortune on Amazon.
com in one sitting can confirm.
This process can either happen by accident
(e.g., we don't pay that much attention to what
we buy, but Amazon's tracking database does) or
more deliberately by tagging content and adding
our own connections to the group pool. People
can also add to your tags and content and here
we see the rich abilities of re-mix culture come
into play, something that is central to the Creative
Waves projects.
In terms of education, the value here is that
we make connections between areas that ap-
peared to be unrelated at first glance, and this
encourages inter-disciplinarity. It also solves the
oft-asked student question, “How do I know what
to do when I don't know what I can do?” All the
while strengthening the bonds between people
with shared interests and creating communities
of practice.
A final aspect to this is that people who are
used to working in socially networked communi-
ties often harbour a set of values that are worth
encouraging.Yahoo!'s Tom Coates (Coates, 2006)
sums up the three main requirements for any social
software application thus:

• An individual should get value from their

contribution
These contributions should provide value •

to their peers as well
The organisation that hosts the service •

should derive aggregate value and be able
to expose this back to the users (Coates,
2006)

This is an excellent blueprint for any endea-
vour, yet the ability of most existing educational
structures to change in this direction is question-
able. Indeed, providing advice and value to peers
would often result in accusations of plagiarism,
yet these are powerful social values in which the
value of your own interests also creates value for