i have spent a couple of hours working on the web 2.0 class that jim and i will teach on tuesday. i am quite excited about how we have chosen to structure the class, with stations and practical time, rather than a lot of lecturing… it feels a bit more practice-what-you-teach-ish. and serendipitously, jill’s last post has led me to an article from o’reilly which gave me some great fodder for the class. i like the way he stresses the organic nature of web 2.0 and how the focus is on the decentralization of power and information. or as dan gillmor puts it, the ‘we, the media’ rather than the few and the big.  we also will talk a bit about tagging and the role of the link and in folksonomy (which yes, at the moment sounds like a bunch of buzzwords, but we will explain how they all work together.)

after preparing this class i got the same sense i did when preparing my last thesis seminar. that the online sphere of information and people is not really a sphere at all…rather a pulsing, moving, generating whorl. just as i refuse to use the word blogosphere any more (in favor of blogowhorl), i don’t want to refer to the my online experience as a place with boundaries (no space, highway, city, cyber dirt road)… my experience is organic and breathes into life my  thoughts and ideas that can only come from the experiences and collaborations i have in my cyberwhorl.