With that gesture, MIT OpenCourseWare helped launch an important educational movement, one that MIT President Susan Hockfield described today as both the child of technology and of a far more ancient academic tradition: "the traditional of the global intellectual commons."

The opening keynote at today's OCW Consortium meeting was Tim O'Reilly, founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media, who spoke on "Perspectives on Open" and on what opencourseware and open education can learn from the open source movement.

The focus, says O'Reilly is on changing the world by spreading the knowledge of these innovators, focusing on that mission itself rather than on how that is actually accomplished.

And that is the advice he had for the OpenCourseWare Consortium members in the audience today, the representatives of the 250 universities who have published some 15,000 courses online - free and openly licensed: Focus on the mission. Think deeply about what it is that universities really do.

Unbundling the University with OpenCourseWare

Are universities about credentials or research? Are they a repository of knowledge? It's important, O'Reilly argued, if you want to be innovative "to think about what job you do for your customers (for your students) and not just think about how you do that job today but why you do it."

But it isn't simply a matter of thinking (or rethinking) your mission when it comes to making your university's course content available online. O'Reilly emphasized the importance of smaller pieces and modular design - to disassemble or unbundle some of that lengthy university heritage and offer OCW students learning opportunities that work more like YouTube talks, perhaps - 5 minute increments rather than 90 minute lectures, or semester-long courses.

Focus on the People, Not Just the Project

One of the most important lessons to be learned from open source may be to develop in public. O'Reilly pointed to the social coding site GitHub or the open source directory Ohloh as examples of how the development of ideas can and should be undertaken in public and with a community in mind.

It's important to make affordance for "the social," and to add community participation even to the things that may not seem inherently participatory. Developing an "architecture of participation" doesn't just mean measuring how many people download your courses or view your pages, but accounts for how many people actually contribute.

There seem to be many forces at play right now that are forcing higher education to rethink itself - rising student loan debt, falling government and foundation funding. Some universities are weighing the decision to monetize their course content online via distance learning programs, as opposed to opening that content via OCW.

Opencourseware, much as the open source movement did to software development, may be one of the key things that helps universities reconsider how they can build an open and interoperable learning environment and how they can actually create more value than they capture.

The slides from O'Reilly's talk are embedded below and available here.

For those who always have Facebook in a browser tab, the Facedesk application may hold some appeal. Essentially, this AIR app does nothing more than take the Facebook web site and place it into an Adobe AIR app. However, with Facedesk outside the browser, you can easily switch to it via Alt+Tab in Windows or Cmd+Tab on Mac. Beyond that, there isn't much to the application, but it was fun to check out nonetheless.

Zebr

The more useful of the two Facebook AIR apps is definitely Zebr. This AIR app reminds me of Twhirl for Facebook status updates. From Zebr, you can keep tabs on your friends' status changes as well as update your own. In addition, the app also keeps you updated on incoming messages and wall posts. When you're not using it, you can minimize Zebr to your system tray to keep it out of the way - alerts will still display as they come in. Zebr is available from their application page on Facebook.

Flair

Flair, like Zebr, is an app that keeps you in touch with your Facebook friends throughout the day without you having to login to the web site. Flair will alert you when you're poked, someone writes on your wall, or adds you as a friend. However, unlike Zebr, you are not alerted to friends status' updates. Although Flair does alert you to various items, in order to interact with Facebook - like, for example, to add new friends - you'll still need to login to the Facebook web site. Flair also minimizes to the system tray when not in use.

On its official website, the campaign organizers - three Chinese bloggers by the names of Flypig, Webleon and Babechloe - also released a #080808 buddy icon template (download), to encourage Twitter users to make their own #080808 buddy icon. See the images below for inspiration.

#080808 Twitter Buddy Icons collected by YUKI.N

A note that Twitter is not popular in China, but the Beijing Olympics could be a booster for the product there.

Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform. Chief among those rules is this: Build applications that harness network effects to get better the more people use them. (This is what I've elsewhere called "harnessing collective intelligence.")

We can perhaps simplify that even further: Web 2.0 is the web as a platform and collective intelligence (or, leveraging of user created data). Now let's look at Tim's definition of Web 3.0 (which actually predates his last Web 2.0 definition):

Recently, whenever people ask me "What's Web 3.0?" I've been saying that it's when we apply all the principles we're learning about aggregating human-generated data and turning it into collective intelligence, and apply that to sensor-generated (machine-generated) data.

Which we can simplify to mean, the leveraging of the things we created in Web 2.0. And here's the Web 2.0 defintion he had up on a slide yesterday during his keynote:

• The Internet is the platform
• Harnessing the collective intelligence
• Data as the "Intel Inside"
• Software above the level of a single device
• Software as a service

O'Reilly talked about Web 2.0 in terms of taking user-generated data and turning it into user facing services. So now we're starting to see a lot of overlap between the two definitions. He's also brought in a lot of Web 3.0 definitions that other people have given and used them as part of this broader definition of Web 2.0. For example, Eric Schmidt of Google talked about Web 3.0 in terms of sofware as a service and cloud computing. Our own Alex Iskold talked about Web 3.0 in terms of web sites being turned into platforms. And so on.

"For 'Web 3.0' to be meaningful we'll need to see a serious discontinuity from the previous generation of technology ... I find myself particularly irritated by definitions of 'Web 3.0' that are basically descriptions of Web 2.0," Tim O'Reilly once said, which is mildly ironic given that his current Web 2.0 definition basically eclipses his old Web 3.0 definition. But in reality, I think O'Reilly is saying that the versioning doesn't really matter -- the web is the web.

"The points of contrast [between Web 2.0 and Web 3.0] are actually the same points that I used to distinguish Web 2.0 from Web 1.5. (I've always said that Web 2.0 = Web 1.0, with the dot com bust being a side trip that got it wrong.)," wrote O'Reilly last fall. In otherw words, the versioning of the web is silly. Web 1.0, 2.0, or 3.0 is all really just whatever cool new thing we're using the web to accomplish right now.

And he has a point. A couple of days ago, we wrote about the history of the term Web 3.0 and noted that the term itself doesn't really matter, what matters is the discussions we have when trying to define it. "It is the discussion that is helpful rather than coming to any accepted definition. Some might argue that version numbers are silly on the web, that Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 are just marketing ploys, and that we shouldn't use terms that are so nebulous and difficult to define. Those are all fair points. But at the same time, the discussions we have about defining the next web help to solidify our vision of where we're going -- and you can't get there until you decide where you want to go," we wrote.

Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 -- they don't really exist. They're just arbitrary numbers assigned to something that doesn't really have versions. But the discussion that those terms have prompted have been helpful, I think, in figuring out where the web is going and how we're going to get there; and that's what is important.

So next time someone asks me what we cover on ReadWriteWeb, maybe I won't use the term "Web 2.0" in my reply, I'll just tell them that we write about the web, what you can do with it now, and what you'll be able to do with it in the future.