Week 7: Web 2.0 Behaviors

1. In the Metzger article, one of the findings was that students minimally verify the content of the information they receive from the Internet. Then again, students minimally verified the content of the World Book when that was the hot research source, though admittedly, the World Book did have some sort of peer review process. Does this mean that, with the advancement of technology, we need to shift the focus of how we think about research, especially in a K-12 classroom? It wasn't that long ago, but when I was in public school, both the topic and the methds for researching the topic were important. With so much information at hand, do the research methods actually begin to trump the information itself?

2. In their article, Adar and Huberman discuss "free riders" on the Gnutella network and lament their damage to the community. This discussion made me reflect on my experiences (past only, of course) with downloading from peer networks. I remember, at the very beginning, downloading from FTP sites. Some allowed free downloaded, while others required that you upload in order to download. For these sites that required an upload, 1:1 or 1:2 ratios were not uncommon, meaning that you could only download an amount proportional to what you uploaded. Then came the peer networks ... Napster, Gnutella, LimeWire, KaZaa, and now BitTorrents. On these networks, especially the ones offering copyrighted materialas, of course there are a lot of freeriders. Why? Well it is the people who share, not download, who tend to be targeted by groups such as the RIAA. Do many people use services like Gnutella to share non-copyrighted material? While peer-to-peer services may have a noble calling, in my mind, they are mainly the way to obtain Warez (cracked or otherwise made-free commercial software), MP3s, video (TV shows and movies), and pornography. Are there actually legal uses (with the stipulation of people actually using them)?