LIS 9763

Individuals dictating the course of government, consumer goods, these were crazy ideas not too long ago. In the web 2.0 world we have; Obama, consumer forums, and YouTube. The way the world conducts business is changing. Yet there are still naysayers that doubt the existence of this culture change—one of those naysayers is my sister.
 
My sister is a teacher librarian at an elementary school. When I told her I was would be working with the Government of Canada’s wiki she told me 'you know you’re going to have a hard time convincing people they have to put stuff on a wiki. We tried a wiki here, and it failed. The teachers wanted to be paid more to do it. They didn’t want to do extra work on their free time'. When she said this, I was mad. I thought 'wow, she thinks my project is going to fail'.
 
Well, I know my sister doesn't want me to fail. I didn't like what she said, and I don't agree with her, but, she did make a valuable point. The article by Casey & Stephens draws on this point; people don’t want to do extra work, to get them involved you must engage users. They go on to provide a To-do list, which consists of ways to engage a user community. That's where the wiki at my sister's school failed. There was no engagement to the community, so the new tools were bound to fail. Naysayers see web 2.0 as extra work, they look past the potential for collaboration. Once individuals buy into web 2.0 work, and become more efficient,  we tap into collective wealth of knowledge. After all we is smarter than we. Teachers new to the profession have access to the knowledge and experience of those retiring. I think we (in this class) understand the merits of web 2.0, that there is a learning curve, that there needs to be considerable outreach. We now need to show go out and show people the power of collaboration tools users how they can use these technologies.