2007 seems to be an extraordinary year for the education on social tagging and web 2.0 applications more generally.

Joining Research and Practice: Social Computing and Information Science will probably be among the richest conferences and will be held October 18-25, in (Milwaukee, Wisconsin) as a part of the ASIS&T Annual Meeting.

The deep change that is impacting our culture and way of perceiving the technology is very clear:

Web 2.0 and social computing are changing the way people use and perceive the Internet as well as the way they work and play. When users are no longer simply consumers of information, and become active producers and contributors, what are the implications for information science? How are social computing and Web 2.0 trends affecting the work of information professionals? What current research and applications are shaping future directions?

New tools introduce new questions, new problems and news opportunities:

• How and what to study in understanding people’s behaviors in web 2.0? Are there significant behavioral or attitudinal changes?
• How and what to measure in understanding web 2.0 and library 2.0 impacts? What are the metrics for ROIs?
• What are the underpinnings of folksonomy? How does folksonomy mesh with taxonomy? What is the role of metadata in social computing?
• How does information architecture affect social computing and vice versa?
• What are the trends in user interface design? How will interfaces evolve beyond current web-based designs as social computing grows?
• How might developments in computer gaming inform design for or impact learning?
• Is the information world getting flatter? What can we learn from perspectives outside of the United States?
• Is social computing creating too much information? How does web 2.0 influence the way we create, represent, organize, store, retrieve, and disseminate information?
• How are all the new trends in social computing affecting information science education?

Managers want a clear economical view of the ROI of these activities, patterns are emerging, different disciplines are becoming relevant to the comprehension of this phenomenon.

The main trend for me is the need for a larger picture on web 2.0 applications and their effects on the information world, also outside of the United States.

In the same category:

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 19th, 2006 at 7:32 pm and is filed under Information Architecture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.