Professional Communication Technologies

Well  my thoughts on Web 2.O  and on the Reader are quite straightforward. I have been lucky enough to watch the development of the use of a PC right through to the now wide and common use of tablets and the Internet.

I remember using the Internet primarily for e-mail when working in an office environment and thought it was a fabulous improvement on the level on communication that had preceded it.
We started to use and develop websites to enable people to view our products and our our company details. But at that stage Web 2.0 was still under the radar for the majority of people.

My first introduction to Web2.0 was using Friends Reunited, where you were able to search for old friends and then communicate with them. It rapidly became a very useful tool for potentially locating and communicating with people that you had not seen or spoken to for many years, primarily old school friends. At roughly the same time, my daughters' were both using BEBO and MSN chat, however, I found both of these systems did not hold any interest to me.

The development and rapid rise of the success of Facebook became an overnight wonderment to me. I was  able to find old dancing friends, communicate with people privately or publicly, discover things about people that I probably would never have discovered and also post my thoughts and feelings on my wall.

The statistics in the reader made me think about the averages given. Some of the statistics are quite staggering and I think there is definitely a case of limiting your friendship circle. As a dance teacher I often receive friend requests from the students that I teach, but I politely refuse and tell them that I consider it unethical from a teacher/pupil perspective. I have, however, created a Facebook Group (open to invited members only) for the dance school students and parents where I keep them informed of events, timetables, class changes. As a closed group any photographs are not visible to anyone outside of the group which, to me, is a vital part of the use of Web2.0. However, they are able to access the general information and contact details to enable prospective new s

My security and the security of my friends is important and my friendship circle is limited to "Friends" and not acquaintances. The statistics and to be fair some of the other students comments about the amount of friends they have, show that many people will add someone the day after they have met them in a bar/audition/other social setting and I wonder how many of those people would be friends that they would communicate with on a usual basis - i.e. telephone, face to face, email!!

I like the simplification of the description of  Web2.0 at the end of the paragraph of Ulrich et al (2008). Web 2.0 is the development of communication from a one to one and one to many basis into a many to many basis, where potentially thousands of people can respond and react and interact with each other over one single item of information. For example, many comments posted about a YouTube video.

I have enjoyed the reader and it has made me think beyond my current limits, however as someone who grew up without computers, the Internet and mobile phones I have been very open to developing and improving my knowledge of technology as they have developed.