Web 2.0 goes academia: does Web 2.0 make a difference?

Abstract

Web 2.0 is often attributed with a high potential to address today's challenges in knowledge management and distributed collaboration. This is due to the focus on innovative and creative sociotechnical concepts that are strongly influenced by informal communication and collaboration. This development has already reached industry. Using the term 'Enterprise 2.0', different possibilities to use social software in enterprises are researched. But also in academia, cooperation to generate new knowledge and add it to the scientific discourse may radically change under open Web 2.0 conditions. In addition, teaching and learning scenarios might be moved towards technology-enhanced lifelong learning communities. In this article, we will give an overview of the influence that Web 2.0 has on academia and what innovative forms of cooperation might emerge from this. Before we focus on academia and show the potential of Web 2.0 in this domain, we first describe Web 2.0 as a sociotechnical phenomenon and show how technical and social systems differ in order to define Sociotechnical Communities (STCs) and the criteria for them.