Exploration is fundamental to Geography and Geographers have a long history of sharing their travel observations with the public through publication in books and journals. In the 21st century, the Internet offers the potential for the immediate publication of material on websites and blogs.
For this group project you will merge the oldest tradition of Geography with the latest Web 2.0 technologies, including blogs, photo sharing, social networking and video. The end product will be an interactive, illustrated, real-time account of your travels and work in Crete. Your website will be created “in the field” and published on Wordpress.com. This presents considerable challenges and advanced planning will be all important.
Web 2.0
Web 2.0 is considered to represent a second generation of web development and design that facilitates communication, information sharing and collaboration.
Examples of Web 2.0 inspired sites include, Wikipedia, social networking (e.g. Twitter, Facebook, ning), blogging (Wordpress, Blogger, etc), photo sharing (e.g. Flickr), and video (e.g. Youtube).
Each of these sites is characterised by how easy it is for ordinary people to contribute and share. You will all have been actively involved in communication, information sharing and collaboration using sites like Facebook and ning. You will all have accessed, if not contributed to, material on Youtube. Web 2.0 is therefore already part of your daily lives.
In this project you will harness Web 2.0 to deliver academic content as a “virtual field trip”. Your group project website will be created using the blogging platform, Wordpress.com. You are likely to utilise both Flickr and Youtube and may integrate other material, such as feeds from Twitter or content delivered through third-party gadgets.
This site provides introductions to each of these technologies.
References
O’Reilly, T. (2005) What is Web 2.0. http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html.
