A Guiding window to a closed door

Web 2.0, a term is not just a technology, a set of tools and service, but it is a technological revolution, a global phenomenon which has changed the way the world interacts. Transition of the concept of Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web to Web 2.0, imparted a diverse set of powerful web tools designed to delegate digital prowess to specific interest groups as well as the masses in general. This digital express highway of knowledge is consumed and contributed to, at macro and micro level. It is a user centered, easy and a friendly movement with a vision to provide individual, collective, or collaborative information space to its avid users. It brings the heterogeneous collection of participatory exponents under the single umbrella, where local to global news, views and ideas are shared and exchanged, catering to the human welfare, growth and development.
A web technology of the contemporary generation is distinctly social, where web based communities like “World Pulse’ has provided access, to link with a diverse group of people heading from around the world. Blogs, wikis, trackback, pod casting, video blogs, and enough social networking tools like MySpace, Skype and Face book is shaping the ways and means where a new form of ‘social fabric’ is being weaved around web 2.0, a society emerging with local concerns procuring global solution. Information, from around the corner of the world, is shared to a vast number of audience in a matter of seconds. Activists, business groups, entrepreneurs, educators, academicians, students, researchers, libraries, writers and publishers are incessantly adapting to these services and are individually developing methodologies to access the technology to the larger benefit of the society and self.
Women uprising and movements is triggered and boomed, and supported by the world citizens, akin to the ‘One Billion Rising’. Personal and community based narratives of injustice, political and social abuses, war crimes against women are gaining space. The stories of physical violence, rape, ritualistic cruelty, political mistreatment and exploitation, religious abuse, dogmatic neglect, social malice, economical inequality, which would have remained untold forever, are unveiled and documented in a form of video or text by the netizens. Digital media and social networking sites have become a window to a closed door. They are not just attracting mainstream media but are also receiving a broad spectrum of acknowledgement through public discourse, which helps stimulate the thought process of the rather patriarchal community, thus creating general and explicit awareness and sensitivity towards women issues. The only lament is the last woman, who is the direct victim, cannot access this phenomenal world of web 2.0, mostly, owing to illiteracy, or economically deprivation, or less or no proficiency in English. Yet the hope peeps through the grass root activist, who, can serve as a catalyst transporting this world behind that closed door through this window.
Web 2.0 is a new beckon for innovative teaching and learning process. It has been very instrumental in my teaching and research career. It helped me open the domain of unlimited possibilities of knowledge to the students, mostly underprivileged and marginalized. With it, teaching-learning experience has become more visualized and lively. Every now and then, a new window opens to pedagogical potential, a rope way to unexplored possibilities.
Indeed, Web 2.0 is a guiding window to a closed door, waiting to be opened!