Academic use of free web 2.0 services

With the rise of the Web 2.0, the usage of services has been migrating toward a personalized and decentralized or web-based framework. Such process has also catalyzed the emergence of specialized web 2.0 services found useful by different classes of professionals. We choose to shed a bit of light on the services used by academics and researchers and argue about the framework they constitute.

Nowadays academics are using blogs to share ideas and discuss them among themselves. Commenting and notification services associated with blogs help in keeping academics involved in their blogging networks. Posts and their subsequent comments are found to be highly effective in online knowledge constructivism. This paradigm is different from that of the famous wikipedia where convergence toward common grounds is mandatory and historical evolution of thoughts is not visible.

A quick survey of web-based media sharing tools such as flickr for images and youtube for video reveals that academics do rely on their services both to share media among themselves and to publish media elements for public feedback. Other services used include appointment management tools that facilitate the setting of meetings and conferences by synthesising the preferences of all participants. We also cite collaborative environments for document processing and statistical analysis such as those offered by google document.

Academics also benefit from a web 2.0 toolbox designed for them explicitly. One type of such tools is a special category of social bookmarking services devoted to academic references and citations such as citeulike.com. Connotea.org is another example of such services that allow academics to keep track of online references. It tries to mix both citeulike.com with del.icio.us, a commonly used social bookmarking site that relies on folksonomies to cluster bookmarks collected by users.

The focus on the academic usage of web 2.0 services aims to clarify how free license services form a distributed and personalized framework where academic societies can interactively share and procreate new knowledge. The success of these services puts forward a question about the utility of developing unified locally-hosted frameworks and opens the possibility to contemplate the potential of an integrated online framework that encompasses these services in a personalized fashion.

Add comment March 23rd, 2007