MIICE using Wiki’s

I have to admit that I have not yet become an instinctive Blogger. But there is no doubt that the Web 2 applications are gaining popularity. I see that the MIICE project has recently setup its own Wiki.

See
http://wiki.miice.org.uk/wiki/show/HomePage

I had a quick look this morning and made a short contribution.

The Web is now becoming a very complex place with a great deal of the structure and content left to individuals as they author their own web pages. I am not saying that this is a bad thing – quite the contrary, it gives individuals control over their own ability to publish their own thoughts and views etc. But at the same time the range of facilities there must now be very daunting for new participants.

One thing I have observed about my own children is their ability to adopt new technology without any real problem.

Take the mobile phone as text communication device.

I recall having a conversation with Stephen Heppell ( see http://www.heppell.net/) when he described some research that Ultralab had done into using mobile phone as a text communication device. This was just before the use of mobile phone really took off. Apparently the research concluded that mobile phone were not suitable as a text communication device because of the limitations of the key pad.

Look at the situation now when most children in the UK have a mobile telephone and communicate with them using text ‘fluently’. They simply reinvented the english language to make it easier to use through this medium by abbreviating words using combinations letters and numerical characters etc.

Just goes to show how versatile our young people can be.

Its clearly old ‘codgers’ like me that have difficulty adopting and exploiting this new technology. Children seem to have a great capacity to simply ‘get on’ with it!!!!