Dr. Wesch studies anthropology, which is the social science that studies the origins and social relationships of human beings. With his observation of how media can alter society and social relationships, he started to study the new media landscape called Web 2.0. In short Web 2.0 is web development that focuses on two things; users and information sharing. YouTube, wikipedia, blogs, flickr, digg are just some examples of Web 2.0 applications that allow you to share videos, knowledge, information, photos and articles respectively. As more people become connected to the internet and networks become faster and more ubiquitous, Web 2.0 applications will only get more popular.

Understanding how this new media landscape will impact society will help us rethink our outdated ideas, for example current teaching methods, which is Dr. Wesch’s interest. It was while lecturing that he noticed how current teaching methods were not suitable for today’s generation. I have not seen the other videos on his class projects but basically the projects have focused on combining the knowledge of every single student in his class. This new interactivity has let in a breath of fresh air in his classes and achieved impressing results. For his innovation teaching techniques he was awarded U.S. professor of the year in 2008.

The video has made me think about the future of communication and how it will shape everyone’s lives. And to help myself understand I have made delicious, digg and twitter accounts. I can see the definite trends in today’s society; open source software, free knowledge, applications that allow human interactivity, increased connectivity and faster network connections. If a collection of 200 undergraduates can develop ground breaking research, imagine the power of combining the minds of the world. The most popular sites on the web are the ones promoting interactivity; facebook, myspace, wikipedia, file sharing sites, etc. The most popular games are MMORPGs such as WoW. I think Dr. Wesch was right on the future, we will only see an increase in interactivity and faster connections to the internet, which will allow everyone to be connected to everyone instantly. Good or bad? No idea but it will definitely be very interesting.

What does this have to do with cloud computing? Basically the cloud is a metaphor for the Internet. Cloud computing basically means having computing services provided on the Internet. Using my example you can see the benefits of the cloud (in my case the cloud computing service was provided for free), i.e. I had access to a list of my favourite sites from any computer with an internet connection, I have one centralised bookmarks file and I can now share my favourite sites with everyone with an internet connection. Since more and more people are getting connected to the Internet and we are getting faster Internet connections, this really seems like the future of computing. Businesses will no longer need to buy computing equipment, hire administrators or even web designers; they just need to pay for cloud computing services. Individuals will also prefer the cloud, as it can mean many things such as they don’t have to worry about backing up their data or can have access to their files from anywhere.

Google at the moment is really positioning itself as THE service provider for cloud computing. They provide services (mostly free) for you to store your conversations, your documents, your internet history, your journal, your photos and countless other things. I don’t like the idea of having everything owned by one company which is pretty much the only disadvantage I see in cloud computing, since it will only make Google stronger. But oh well, we’ve been living under Microsoft for so many years now, time for a change I guess.