Jeffrey,

I have to agree with you that the idea the Web 2.0 is ubiquitous is a flawed one. There are certainly pockets of uneven development, as with all things. And the idea that NYC is one of them is fascinating to me. Upon a trip up there in April, I was certain I would spend far less time online if I lived their, because the city is simply awesome, and demands your attention and labor far more than any other place I have been to. So you may have a very interesting theory there.

As for the whole question of where this is? Well, I think the term Web 2.0 has been useful, but has forced us and corporations to focus to specifically on a set of tools and resources, something I am guilty of –but which I know is flawed. The idea of injecting new idea that focus on a committment to engage and innovate with a space may not have as much to do with technology as we think. It may have far more to do with community, connecting, and re-imagining. Web 2.0 has an underlying logic of progress and new and better and shiny, it begins to cramp any sense of the ideas and people that are key to what we do. And as corporations jump on the bus, the push to centralize and make all these things that much simpler and easier reframes them as less an object of innovation than one of efficiency and convenience.

I know this is a dangerous argument, and I am sure there are holes, but at the same time, technology intersects at points with teaching and learning, and may provide specific set of possibilities, but it is the people behind this ideas and the ability to frame your own space in a distributed discourse that remains far more important than any notion of ease, affordabity, and logic of centralized design –something which I personally see further dulling the value of a term like Web 2.0 –and further forcing those folks who were not using it to see it as just another thing they should do.

Make it optional, make it meaningful, and make it fun —more than that make it their own.