Everyday Literacies

Guilty of loitering

OK,OK. I plead guilty. Don't tell anyone, but it's true that I got sidetracked from "head down and key key key kontent kos I'm so far behind and some deadlines won't wait". But I lapsed, momentarily, and in the middle of updating some cut and paste about Steven Johnson's blog actually went there and read his recent post on Web 2.0. Wanting to push it further, cos Anya and others have mentioned it recently, I ran a quick search and came up with Tim O'Reilly's wonderful article of a week or so ago on What is Web 2.0?.

For some reason that could be linked to the fact that right now we are having to turn our attention to producing within a tight timeline the second edition of our New Literacies book -- and thank you to those of you who have read it or, at least, who have wrestled with some of it (smile) -- the way O'Reilly juxtaposes Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 resonated strongly with the idea of contending 'mindsets' that, for us, mark what we think is really at stake between 'new' literacies and those we might not call 'new'. The difference in 'mindset' between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 seemed to me to run kind of parallel to much of what, for us, constitutes 'Old' and 'New' respectively in the literacyscape.

Still more resonated -- and I think it probably represents work we will need to do before long. It goes to the idea we have clumsily referred to in our fledgling work on 'digital epistemologies'. The points I homed in on were O'Reilly's references to Wikipedia and to the Cloudmark collaborative approach to producing spam filters. Whereas our work on digital epistemologies to date has tended to focus on aspects of credibility and validity and significance that do not seem to lean toward some kind of 'truth' criterion, it is obvious that there is useful work to be done around the Web 2.0/Wikipedia variant of 'expertise'. For what is at stake here is not so much a matter of questioning or abandoning 'quality' defined in relation to something like 'reasonableness' or 'defensible arguability' or correspondence to what the best formed minds in the area think. Rather, it is more a question of how a knowledge community gets to that quality. The 'old' way was through nurturing and honouring individual expertise. A kind of disciplinary equivalent to 'power blogging'. The 'new' way seems to be through harnessing collective expertise through successive refinements and ongoing conversations.

This suggested the question of whether and, if so, to what extent, there is any prospect for moving from School 1.0 to School 2.0. Because, thus far, for all the hype about digital literacies, 21st century literacies (yetch, how presumptuous can this rhetoric get?), new basics, more new basics, and all the rest of currentspeak, I can't see anything much on any horizon anywhere that looks like official interest in something that might plausibly be called School 2.0 at the points of producing and assessing scholastic knowledge and understanding that really matter.

Or am I just looking for 2.0 in all the wrong places?