Week 6 Journal

Reflecting on my fast-paced 6-week Summer Web 2.0 class with Dr. Dennen at Florida State University, as a lifelong learner and as an instructional designer, I will most definitely use Web 2.0 tools professionally, at least as much as my organization will allow. The firewall that is in place within our organization does not allow complete access to all web sites in order to utilize open blogs, wikis, etc. We do have wikis and blogs available on our Intranet, however, I discovered during the Produsage 1 assignment, that it is very rarely utilized.  This realization made me wonder whether I could maybe make the sites more active if I began blogging, etc. on our internal Intranet.

I was very interested to read in Shirky about AT&T engineers working with a small business many years ago that used open source tools for programming support in the Perl community.  The AT&T folks believed that unless you paid for support, no real support existed in the open source communities that have become so prevalent in produsage.  Yet, the small company that AT&T was working with at that time went on to become very successful.  This was a real eye opener for me, and made me realize, there is quite an advantage to having community input – at no cost!