Educational Research and Innovation Inspired by Technology, Driven by Pedagogy: A Systemic Approach to Technology-Based School Innovations (PDF)

the manipulation and presentation of data through the interaction of both human and computer agents”.

Of course, many computer scientists dispute the technical necessity of such rebranding of the Internet. As Scholz (2008) argues, many claims for the technical novelty of Web 2.0 applications are misleading, with much use of the term driven by a commercial and political “branding mania and obsession with newness”. Yet issues of originality notwithstanding, the notion of Web 2.0 is an important framing device for understanding contemporary Internet use – defining “what enters the public discourse about the impact of the Internet on society” (Scholz, 2008).

In particular the “Web 2.0” label reflects the changing nature of contemporary online activity – not least what is described as a “mass” Internet connectivity based around the collective actions of online user communities rather than individual users (see O’Reilly, 2005; Shirky, 2008; Brusilovsky, 2008). Thus in contrast to the “broadcast” mode of information exchange that characterised Internet use in the 1990s, the Web applications of the 2000s are seen to rely on openly shared digital content that is authored, critiqued and re-configured by a mass of users – what has been described as “many-tomany” connectivity as opposed to “one-to-many” transmission.

Put simply, the current prominence of “Web 2.0” within popular and academic discussion of the Internet reflects the growing importance that is being placed on interaction between and within groups of Internet users. In this sense, Web 2.0 re-invigorates many of the debates that began in the 1990s about the transformatory nature of the Internet (Roberts, 2009). Yet unlike the Internet of the 1990s “Web 1.0” as some commentators have now retrospectively branded it), current debates are propelled by notions of online immediacy where users can get what they want, when they want it – “propelled … by a fantasy of intuition in which the Web already knows what you want because it is you” (Evens, 2009).