Learning v2.0

I’ll say it: I am NOT tech savvy... at all!
Somehow the technological craze that shook my generation skipped me. Here I am, in my mid 20s (won't say how old because a lady should never say her age), and I can barely do word count on Word. However I am willing to accept my ignorance and - more importantly - do something about it.

"What is web 2.0?"

I first came across the term during my time in the UC Washington Program. I was an intern at the Association of American Universities (AAU) and part of my duties included attending meetings for the Task Force on the Future of American Innovation.

The Task Force consisted of educational and industry representatives working together for a common goal: increase funding in basic sciences. Last year was particularly hard because of budget cuts. Places like SLAC and Fermilab were facing serious reductions in services, project suspensions, and furloughs. One of my jobs was to gather information about a Senator and maintain a wiki about him.

Given: it was only a wiki so I didn’t need to learn code. But considering I am still amazed by first generation iPods, updating a wiki was a huge deal. They described the wiki as more “web 2.0” and I nodded in agreement, but made a note of the term in my notepad.

I wanted to know exactly what the term meant, but as Will (former economics TA) put it "Everyone has their own definition." It’s hard to understand what something is when it keeps being redefined.

Why do I want to understand this? I’m applying to Graduate School in the near future, and am interested in the way media and technologies interact with society. I can study “society” and “media,” but technologies … I’m no closer to understanding technology than I am to knowing the mathematical models explaining Higgs boson.

Fortunately for me, I’m not trying to pursue a career in theoretical physics. Instead I’m trying to learn more about technology and how to (for a lack of a better description) create stuff.

I emailed Will the other day with the intention of getting a definition of web 2.0. As always he did a good job of simplifying a huge ethereal concept into something that made sense. He even asked if I was asking because I wanted to start a hobby.
I might just do that, thank you very much for the suggestion.

So with that said, I’ve decided to hop on the technology train! First stop: source code and html code (whatever those mean).