web design / interactive media

Communities of practice are formed by people who engage in a process of collective learning in a shared domain of human endeavor: a tribe learning to survive, a band of artists seeking new forms of expression, a group of engineers working on similar problems, a clique of pupils defining their identity in the school, a network of surgeons exploring novel techniques, a gathering of first-time managers helping each other cope.

In a nutshell: Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.

I found this well definition of communities of practice from Dr. Etienne wenger’s web page. He is the one of the famous guy who defined or explains well about communities of practice. I strongly suggest to visit his web site if you really want to know about community of practice. You can find some his video clips on Youtube about Communities of practice as well.

I happen to involve several communities of practice web sites already without notice that I’m doing it. I think it is really great way to learn or share information about something that you want. I have learned lots of things from them. You might already doing it without knowing what it is. I have found some website about Communities of practice below.

http://hbswk.hbs.edu/archive/2855.html

http://www.infed.org/biblio/communities_of_practice.htm

What is social bookmarking?
We use a bookmarker when we read a book and find a page that we want to mark. Why? For sure, that we want to easily find the page later whenever we want. For the same reason, we use computer bookmark on the web browser while we are surfing the Internet and clicking on the “yellow” bookmark button to save the particular page. So, it is easy for us to track back to the saved pages later. However, we won’t be able to link back to the same page from different computer if we happen to use another computer, so the “bookmarking” is useless in this situation. Social bookmarking system was created to provide the “Bookmarking” system more conveniently on one computer to the other computer. Therefore, we are able to choose web pages and tagging, saving, sharing…etc by this new technology. I found one great video called ‘Social Bookmarking in plain English.’ It’s very easy to understand about social bookmarking. I love this video series.

Diigo is one of the social bookmarking services with most various options with multiple functions.As the name of the site tells, “Diigo” bundled up with highlighting, memo, bookmark, edit, information sharing feature and etc. Besides that, “Diigo” is leveled up from the ordinary bookmarking and has editing, highlighting, sending e-mails, automatic posting to blogs, and it is good function for blog users to sharing bookmarks and posting only desirable portions to their blogs. Additionally, “Diggo” users can not only set-up a preference of public or private use, but also it is able to synchronize and sending and scraping bookmarks.

iCyte comes with advanced feature than existing social bookmarking tools. Icyte works as saving the specific webpage itself by bookmarking instead of saving a simple link. Thus, it can prevent from unstable connection and at the same time, it provides highlighting function, project, tag management features to save and manage the web information more effectively and conveniently. Moreover, creating new contents and documents from web information can be easily done by its importing and exporting feature which can be used from Microsoft Word and Excel. Also, sharing e-mails and writing comment functions offer advantages to group works more efficiently.

We all already know about Delicious and have account for it. So I will not explain about it. However, my favorite of these three sites is Delicious. Because it is simpler then the other sites and also like the design of site.

What is RSS? First, I tried to Google it and found one great video clip called Video: RSS in Plain English from YouTube.  This video clip has very clear definition of RSS. It was very helpful to understand about RSS and also, entertaining at the same time. According to the video clip, there is old slow way and new fast way. The old slow way is that you are looking for the new stuffs on Internet by yourself. However, the new fast way is just simple opposite way from old slow way, which is the new stuffs on Internet come to you. That is RSS. There are two steps to getting start RSS. First step is that you need home(RSS reader) for reading new posts. You need to go sign up for reader. You can find the sites such as, Google Reader, My Yahoo, Bloglines or Netvibes. Second step is set up the connection between your reader and your favorite web site. Setting up these connections called subscribing. Once you subscribe the your favorites site, you can find new stuffs from your favorite sites on your reader. I might make you really confuse so, I definitely encourage you to go check this video clip. I also found a site about RSS history. We can see other early developers also tried to make the way.  Last article that I found talked about RSS uses and the underlying technology involved.

In my opinion, RSS is really powerful tool in web research. I’m kind of embarrassed for not fully using it until now. I started using RSS since I made Netvibes account, also I started to use Twitter. I believe these things help me out a lot for getting information from Internet in real time.

Even though I have heard about ‘web 2.0′, I had no idea what the web 2.0 is. Through research about it, I found several interesting articles about web 2.0. They helped me understand the difference between the web 1.0 and the web 2.0 and gave detailed information about them.

The first site that I have visited is O’Reilly: What is Web 2.0. This site contains almost every information about web 2.0 and explains it very clearly. It is understandable, and I agree with the ideas. “ “we, the media,” a world in which “the former audience”, not a few people in a back room, decides what’s important.” The second one was Digital web Magazine: Web 2.0 for Designers. This site talked about how web 2.0 related to web designers. It gave me some Ideas about what I can do when constructing some web sites. Last site that I visited was Tech Soup:  What is Web 2.0 Anyway?. This site is well summarized about blogging, RSS, tagging, social bookmarking and etc. Accoding to the website “Even the smallest organization has a story to share and voices to amplify. Web 2.0 can help you be heard. This new Web of connections is already allowing nonprofit supporters to build movements for social, environmental, economic, and political change. Don’t let your movement leave you behind.”

Web 2.0 is not a top-down environment, but it allow to create new contents and tell our own story. Web 2.0 affects the people who use it culturally, socially, and politically. Those who are most affected would be designers, like us, and developers who will be building it.