Social learning
Podcast, blog, Flickr, wiki... a growing lexicon reflects the arrival of a web that is built by all of us in a torrent of sharing and do-it-yourself activity. Each wave of pervasive digital technology drives a significant advance in our ability to create and communicate media, as well as to consume it: the first generation brought us desktop publishing and email; we are now well into the second generation enabled by the web; and we are beginning to research the impact of the third - the ambient web.
What we see in the current generation of the web is that people are finding an ever-growing repertoire of ways to connect conversations together as shared media. At one end there are very structured examples such as Wikipedia, the free encyclopaedia. At the other end of the spectrum are sites such as Flikr5, where people post photos and create all sorts of strange collections of them by assigning them descriptive tags. In between there is every sort of variation between formality and informality of content, and personal and shared control, as people explore ways to express themselves and share their interests.