Web2.0 Learning Lab

As I'm writing this, I have 23 tabs open in my browser. About 4 of them are for my EME6414 assignments — including Canvas — and another 6 or so are for a proposal I'm working on with my advisor. The remaining 13? All about my upcoming July vacation back to Korea. Don't judge me, though. I'd like to think I'm not doing that badly. I've at least organized them by category: EME6414 / proposal / vacation hotels / vacation food. Oh wait — I forgot to count the YouTube tab playing Yunchan Lim's piano performance, my go-to work background music. So make that 24 tabs total. The mix of tabs obviously shifts depending on what I'm doing. When I'm working on EME6414, I've got Canvas, Google Scholar, FSU Library, NotebookLM, and a stack of paper PDFs going. When I switch to trip planning mode, it's Kakao Map (genuinely better than Google Maps in Korea), hotel booking sites, and an endless pile of blog reviews layered on top of each other. I don't alw...

I can totally relate to what Lowenthal et al. (2016) argued in their article: if you meet someone online whom you've known for some time and then run into them at a conference, you don't start from zero. When I was going through my PhD application interview on Zoom, I remember silently screaming in my head, "Oh my god, it's her!" — sitting face-to-face (virtually) with researchers whose work I had been reading. As I started my PhD program and began attending conferences, I finally got to meet these "superstars" of my field in person. I had read their articles, cited them in my own work, and watched their lectures on YouTube. Even without ever having met them in person, I already shared a kind of history with these renowned scholars. The moment I walked into their sessions, there was an unspoken familiarity — at least on my end. One such moment happened at AERA in Los Angeles, where I ran into Dr. Victor Lee at a concurrent session. I had actually tried ...

Reading Prensky’s “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants” in 2026 made me smile a little. The article opens with a familiar educational alarm: students have changed radically, they read less, they process information differently, and schools were not designed for them. What amused me was not that Prensky was wrong to notice change, but that this was written in 2001. In other words, even twenty-five years ago, adults were already worrying about “kids these days.” The technologies that once marked a dramatic generational break—computers, video games, the internet, cell phones, and instant messaging—now feel like ordinary background noise in everyday life. At the same time, the concern is not meaningless. Technologies do reshape the conditions of learning and participation; they just do not stay “new” for very long. From the typewriter to the computer, from the internet to Web 2.0 platforms, and now to generative AI, each major shift has reorganized how people write, search, connect, and c...

When you work as a teacher, you often don't feel much of a generation gap with your students. But every once in a while, a moment hits you: "Wait, you don't know this?" It happened during a language arts class. The students had drafted essays in their textbooks, gone through several rounds of revision with me, and finally moved to the computer lab to type their work in MS Word—paying attention to grammar and punctuation as they typed. For kids who had only ever used computers for games and casual chatting, transferring "correct, polished writing" into Word was no easy task. As we wrapped up the lesson, I said: "Before you shut down your computer, don't forget to click the little floppy disk icon at the top to save your work." One student looked up and asked, "Fluffy... what, Ms. Han?" "The disk icon! You have to click it to save." And then it hit me.  Oh—these kids were born into a world of USB drives, and now they'r...

 Before reading Bruns, I had been thinking about the words we usually use to describe people on social media: “creator” and “consumer.” These words make sense, but they also felt a little incomplete to me. In reality, many of us are both. We scroll, watch, and read, but we also like, comment, share, repost, save, curate, and sometimes create our own content. I wondered why we often talk as if there are only two separate roles. Bruns’s concept of the “produser” helped resolve that tension for me because it combines these roles into one term. A produser is both a user and a producer. In Web 2.0 spaces, people do not only receive information; they also respond to it, modify it, remix it, comment on it, share it, and sometimes improve it. Even small actions, such as leaving a comment or sharing a resource, can become part of a larger process of knowledge-building. This idea is useful for thinking about learning. In traditional educational settings, students are often positioned as rece...

 I used to be a heavy Instagram user. I liked checking what my friends were doing, replying to DMs, and casually scrolling whenever I had a few minutes. Over time, though, I started to feel that my attention span was getting shorter. As a PhD student, I often need long stretches of focused time, so Instagram began to feel less like a fun social space and more like a constant interruption. Because of that, I have developed a repeated pattern of social media detox. At the beginning of a semester, I usually delete Instagram to reduce distraction. After a month or so, I sometimes reinstall it for one or two weeks. Then, when I need to write a major paper or focus on a big deadline, I delete it again. During the recent break, I used Instagram a lot while attending a conference in Bergen, Norway, and traveling with my family in Vienna. But as soon as I returned to Tallahassee, I deleted it again. However, I realized that my detox is not really a complete detox. Maybe it is more of a “d...