The green web

While I’m typing and while you’re reading this, we’re indirectly contributing to global warming. Just by using a computer, which runs on electricity that is in turn is produced by fossil fuels, we emit 60 grams of CO2 per hour.

I’m loathe to preach about how we should conserve energy to save the world from exploding (and South Africa from intermittent darkness), especially when I’ve got my heater on, cell phone on charge, and a casserole in the oven. My “wrongdoings” probably warrant an entry on True Green Confessions, a website that’s the equivalent of a church’s confessional booth for “sins” against the earth. It’s strange, but addictive.

It may be too little too late, but the new web is making significant attempts to become environmentally friendly, just as food, fashion and business has. Here are some web 2.0 attempts at going green.

Save-the-earth Search Engines

Eco-friendly search engines were the brainchild of Mark Ontkush, who wrote this post on the amount of energy Google could save if it changed its home page from white to black. This is his basic argument:

“Take at look at Google, who gets about 200 million queries a day. Let’s assume each query is displayed for about 10 seconds; that means Google is running for about 550,000 hours every day on some desktop. Assuming that users run Google in full screen mode, the shift to a black background will save a total of 15 (74-59) watts. That turns into a global savings of 8.3 Megawatt-hours per day, or about 3000 Megawatt-hours a year. Now take into account that about 25 percent of the computers are CRTs, and at 10 cents a kilowatt-hour, that’s $75,000, a goodly amount of energy and dollars for changing a few color codes.”

Heap Media launched Blackle last year, a “black” search engine that uses Google search. Unfortunately, the site lacks many of its features like iGoogle, advanced search, and images. A better alternative is Earthle – known as the Black Google -, which is powered by Google, uses less energy and has the exact same features that you’d find on the original search engine. (It looks much sexier too!).

Then there’s the Yahoo! owned GreenBackSearch, which returns the same results as an original Yahoo! search, but the site gives back to the environment by using 50% of its revenue to purchase carbon offsets/credits. Yahoo! also powers a search engine called Ecocho, which grows 2 trees for every 1000 searches conducted on the site.

Eco-friendly social media

Care2Make a Difference is the biggest green social network on the web, with more than eight million users. The network provides a great connection and a wealth of information and services for eco-enthusiasts ranging from healthy living to saving a rainforest with a donation or a signature. Similar green social networks like RiverWired are also on the increase.

The green equivalent of YouTube is Empivot, which aggregates all green- related video content and allows users to upload their own. The site hosts a large amount of audio-visual content from both individuals and companies.

Hugg is the eco-friendly alternative to social bookmarking communities like Digg or del.icio.us. The site is popular and active, and is a useful source of information for anything green related.

Internet users in the US are using Gigoit to donate or get rid of unwanted items instead of dumping them in landfills. The site is like Craigslist, where other users can call dibs on – or as South Africans would say, shotgun – items that they want. The giver then chooses who he wants to donate his stuff to, and the two make arrangements for the exchange. It’s a philanthropic and eco-friendly way to get rid of old cellphones, kids’ toys and dad’s tools that have been collecting dust in our storage room since the 1960s.

Green online shopping has also taken off, with sites like Iallergy and Green Deals Daily offering a variety of environmentally-friendly products to consumers.

For environmental offenders (like me, you and let’s face it, everybody else), EcoGeek and Green Marketing 2.0 provide the latest news on technology and inventions that will help reduce our impact on the environment.

Making a difference

Eco-friendly web 2.0 strategies have taken a lot of flack for their perceived lack of effectiveness. Critics dismiss green social media as mere fluff, and snort in derision at the “black web”, seeing it as regressing towards the ancient MS DOS interface.

But these initiatives, however small their impact may be, are noble and a step in the right direction. Web users should realise that the Internet, for all its wonder and uses, does have a tangible and negative impact on the earth. Given the millions of users and hours spent online, and consequently the amount of CO2 emitted, attempts to create a greener web should be supported.

With that said, I’ve changed my home page to Earthle. Now that I’ve gone black – or should I say green? – there’s no going back.

Learning the Web 2.0 way (2/2)

Technology is not always a student’s best friend. It’s more like a moody, unreliable and can’t-be-trusted ex with whom you have a love/hate relationship. Everyone’s got a few tragic tales about lost essays, blue screens of death, and MS Word suddenly shutting down on them before they could save their work.

But thanks to Ward Cunningham’s invention of the wonder that is Wiki, there is one less problem we have stress about. Gone are the days of e-mailing a document/project/essay back and forth between group members, bickering over who has edited or deleted crucial information, and freaking out when the most updated version can’t be found in anyone’s e-mail account.

A wiki is a combination of a website and a Word document that allows multiple users to access and edit the document collaboratively from a single location. (Hence, no need for feverish e-mailing). More importantly, it keeps track of all the changes made to the document, stores older versions of the document and allows users to compare the older and new version.

Wikis in education

Wikis have great educational value and are being used widely by universities and some schools. Students can use it to work on a group report, compile results or analyse data (Google Spreadsheets), and teachers can use it to collaboratively structure their courses and interact with their students. Because a wiki is a “wide open space” in which everyone has equal power and access, it allows students to “own [their] education experience”. See Wiki evangelist, Stuart Mader’s post on ways to use wikis in education.

Mader has argued in his book that “today’s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach”. Students have grown up surrounded by technology and are comfortable with it; and it’s up to teachers to revise their teaching methods to incorporate tools and resources that could help them build a better, more engaging rapport with their learners.

Teachers at a middle school in the States are doing just that: they are using this wiki to teach their French classes, and provide notes, videos and assignments to their students. Brown University has also set up a course advisor wiki that allows students to edit and review the courses that their professors teach. A lecturer at Bowdoin College has been quite successful in using a more scholarly wiki to engage with students in his Romantic Literature Course. There are also countless number of wikis set up by students to facilitate their own learning, like this one.

Wikis seem to be most commonly used to teach students writing skills. Not only do they encourage engaging writing, close reading and careful editing, they also teach students “network literacy”. According to Jill Walker, a prominent blogger and web 2.0 theorist, this involves preparing students to write collaboratively and for public consumption. It means, “jolting students out of the conventional individualistic, closed writing of essays only ever seen by [their] professor”.

Challenges

When used in the context of educational instruction, wikis have encountered various criticisms. Because it allows anyone to chop and change content, it’s difficult to keep track of who has edited what. Linked to this is the issue of security and how much of “control” should be given to students to edit course content or review papers, etc.

Brian Lamb importantly notes that control is only an issue if teachers/lecturers try to impose it on the medium. The aim of a wiki is ultimately to facilitate learning among students, and with their teachers, in a setting that doesn’t mimic that of a classroom. A teacher’s role on a wiki should be to engage students, not pull rank on them. Lamb argues that teachers must relinquish some of their authority in order for students to engage meaningfully on a wiki. Otherwise, wikis will have no real use or effectiveness for students, and we may as well just be content with PowerPoint.

Wikis present a huge departure from the conventional teacher-student relationship, so it’s understandable why those who are still devoted to the chalk-on-blackboard method of teaching frown upon it. The value that students and teachers accrue from wikis will depend on the extent to which both parties are able to handle the power issue – teachers have to give up some of theirs, and students need to use theirs responsibly.

Sources:

Brian Lamb. “Wide Open Spaces: Wikis, Ready or Not“.

Stuart Mader. “Using Wiki in Education“.

Learning the Web 2.0 way (1/2)

When I was in primary school, the most intolerable subject I had to endure was something called Needlework. Only girls had to take this class while the boys did woodwork. The hour-long weekly lessons involved learning how to stitch buttons, knit with those two chop-stick-type objects, and sew little cushions – skills that were apparently necessary to our education. Apart from the fact that my school perpetuated the sexual division of labour and tried to socialise girls into being “good housewives” one day, my point is that this type of education was archaic and boring. The teacher sat at her desk in the front and tried to demonstrate a backstitch, while the rest of us tried to stay awake and not prick ourselves to death.

Thanks to the new OBE system, Needlework no longer features on the list of skills that students need.

And thanks to Bill Gates and the rest of the techno geeks for new educational tools like Showslides and Moodle that have moved into the mainstream. E-learning is becoming increasingly acceptable and popular among students and teachers, and so too is the use of social media in education. In this post, I review a few (almost brand new) e-learning resources, and in the next, I’ll discuss the use of wikis in education.

LearnHub, which launched last month, is a social network for students and teachers/lecturers. It’s made up of a range of user-created communities around a specific topic, like Mathematics or Photography. Students can interact with other students and with educators. They can join a community created by a “lecturer” who teaches a course by posting lessons (including powerpoint presentations) and tutorials, and initiating debates. The “lecturer” can also set tests and track students’ progress. What’s most impressive is the site offers real-time tutoring through live video, voice and document sharing. All of this is free, but teachers can charge a fee for their courses and for tutoring in the LearnHub marketplace.

The more I use LearnHub, the more I’m impressed by it. While the line between student and teacher is blurred through this mode of learning since anyone can teach a course or offer a solution to an equation, what makes LearnHub an effective educational resource is that many professional teachers and experts have joined the network and are offering courses. The information on the site then is, for the most part, trustworthy. LearnHub also has a reputation system for users to rank other users’ answers/courses. The higher your ranking, the higher your authority on the network. It’s a great way for students to find credible sources, and for teachers to market their expertise or offer it freely.

In the words of its developers, Socrato is a “web-based test preparation and assessment platform”. Professional teachers can use the application to post multiple-choice tests, which their students then take online. Socrato boasts analytical tools that tracks students’ progress and helps them identify their strengths and weaknesses. Students can also create study groups and share content with their peers. The application is currently in its beta phase and freely available to the public, but will become a pay-to-use service soon.

Unlike LearnHub and Socrato, this social network is aimed exclusively at students. While professionals can sign up, skoogO automatically links all students to each other. Based on the profile information you provide, it connects you to other students at your university/school, or those from around the world who are doing a similar course, or even using the same textbook as you are. Students can then ask and answer questions relating to their course, and engage in online peer-to-peer learning this way. Although skoogO aims to be an educational resource for students, they seem to be using it more as an alternative to Yahoo!Answers or the local Answerit, rather than for purely educational purposes. (Questions range from “Is it better to be feared or loved?” to “What shampoo and conditioner is best for naturally curly hair?”).

I’ve e-mailed my younger siblings the links to these sites because I think they really can be valuable and useful to them (and me). While e-learning resources are not a substitute for face-to-face education, they can augment students’ learning and provide them with a variety of knowledge that they otherwise wouldn’t be exposed to. I’m not saying do away with classroom-based education, I’m saying that if a teacher wants to engage with his/her students, he/she should use the technological medium that most appeals to them. This way, they’re less likely to doze off in the middle of a lesson – or prick each other with needles, they way my friends and I did in Needlework class.

The underdogs of social networking

Despite bandwidth issues and warnings from their bosses (in my case, the Rhodes IT department), South Africans have gone gaga over social networking. Justin Hartman’s nifty stats show that there are over 730 000 of us on Facebook, making SA the country with the 10^th highest number of Facebook users in the world.

What’s equally interesting is that many local social networks have emerged in the past year or two, some aimed at connecting the general SA online population, and others at forming interest-based communities.

Home grown

There’s Blueworld, where users can network, share pics and videos, and set up a blog. It also has a free SMS service, and a feature that’s similar to Thunda.com: Blueworld “photographers” cover various clubbing scenes, and then upload the pics to the site. Vrinne is another social network aimed at connecting South Africans from around the world. It’s still a work in progress though, and offers only basic features at the moment.

MyGenius and BizJam are geared towards young entrepreneurs. It seems like a good way for freelancers and small businesses to market themselves.

GayPeers is another network aimed at connecting the South African LGBT community. It has the usual features: blogging, chats, polls, and video and photo sharing. Judging by the number of blog posts, this social network seems to be quite popular.

Then there’s Digspot and StudentVillage, geared towards connecting university students across campuses. One can catch up on the recent events across universities in the form of news bulletins. StudentVillage seems to be more interactive though, due to its live chat option and classifieds section.

My personal favourite is ZoopedUp, a social network for car lovers. Members can create their own “cyber garages”, share pics and videos, and chat about everything automotive on blogs or forums.

Local vs. Global

Despite the variety of local social networks available, South Africans don’t seem to be using them that much. I had a look at South Africa’s Alexa ratings this morning, and Facebook and MySpace featured in the top 20 of the most popular sites in the country. None of the local social networking sites above made the list.

A possible reason for this could be that users simply prefer the “global original” rather than the local equivalent. I’ve joined the BlueWorld and StudentVillage networks, but their novelty has already off for me because none of my friends are members. What’s great about Facebook though is that because its so popular, you’re most likely to find people you know on it, and you can then network with them in a single, convenient space.

While I think social networks like ZoopedUp and BizJam are useful and innovative, those aimed only at South Africans can’t compete with their global counterparts. Partly because of the latter’s colossal appeal, and partly because a South African – or Canadian or Spanish – social network restricts users’ scope of communication. We’re in the age of globalisation, not nationalism, after all.

Blog Debut

Having just completed an academic essay on social media, I could regurgitate the wonder of Web 2.0 and how it has turned users into producers; how social media use blurs the boundaries between media/audience and reception/production; how the new web allows for a reconstitution of… I’ve started to lose you already, right?

The purpose of this blog is to unpack social media for the average web user (that’s me included).  I’m an avid Facebook user and blog reader, but I haven’t given much thought to the medium, and if and how the incalculable hours I’ve spent online have changed anything about me.   

There’s so much that’s already been said about social media, but also quite a bit that hasn’t.  Through a blog series that begins next week, I’ll be looking at a range of social media forms – blogs, social networks, wikis and the rest – and reviewing some of them.  I’ll also consider social media’s general impact, its influence on users’ identity, its utility for businesses and traditional media, and its democratic potential.  All this, I promise, without causing you to keel over your keyboard from boredom.

As I’m proudly South African (except when the electricity cuts off), I’ll also be covering our flourishing social media scene and finding out what the “experts” have to say.

Now excuse me while I go change my Facebook status to, “Qudsiya is now a blogger!”