The Web 2.0 Expo, co-produced by TechWeb and O’Reilly Media, is a global annual gathering of technical, design, marketing, and business professionals who are building the next generation web. It just wrapped up it’s East Coast run today. The conference featured a number of phenomenal keynote and general session speakers.

Among the keynotes was one of my favorite authors and presenters: Clay Shirky. Shirky is an adjunct professor at NYU who studies social media, and author of the book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. During his keynote Thursday at Web 2.0 Expo in New York, Shirky examined the problem of information overload. His premise was the fact that the problem is not that we have too much information to process. The problem is that our filters are inadequate. And privacy breakdowns are a similar problem — privacy is threatened because the filters we relied on to keep our private data confidential are broken, and we haven’t evolved good mechanisms to replace those filters yet. I thought that it was one of his best presentations and I’ve shared it below.

For a thoughtful summary and evaluation of Shirky’s presentation, take a look at Mitch Wagner’s post on Information Week’s Digital Life Blog titled: Clay Shirky Busts The Myth Of Information Overload At Web 2.0 Expo.

To take a look at other great presentations from the Web 2.0 Expo, take a look at the videos here and the speakers presentation files here. Definitely looks like it’s a well run and worthwhile event to attend.

I’ve written about Dr. Michael Wesch a number of times in the past. For those of you not familiar, Dr. Wesch is a professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University and heads the Digital Ethnography Working Group, a team of cultural anthropology undergraduates exploring the impact of digital technology on human interaction and human interaction on digital technology.

Wesch, dubbed the Explainer by Wired Magazine has created and produced videos on technology, education, and information have been viewed over seven million times and are frequently featured at international film festivals and major academic conferences worldwide. He is perhaps most known for his videos that concisely but accurately describing the fundamental concepts surrounding the Web 2.0 phenomenon (Web 2.0… The Machine Is Us/ing Us). He recently did a public presentation on June 17, 2008 at the University of Manitoba where he described his own attempts to integrate Facebook, Netvibes, Diigo, Google Apps, Jott, Twitter, and other emerging technologies to create an education portal of the future.

“It’s basically an ongoing experiment to create a portal for me and my students to work online,” he explains. “We tried every social media application you can think of. Some worked, some didn’t.”

Image by University of Manitoba

The video I am linking to above on the University of Manitoba website is all about media literacy and how he engages his students at Kansas State University. This 66 minute video provides some insight into how he tries to make students knowledge-able (able to create and critique knowledge) rather than knowledgeable (mind dump education). The 66 minute video is lengthy but well worth the time if you are involved in education or professional development or are interested in what is really possible and how it can be done using collaborative technologies to engage and interact with learners.

As many of us know explaining exactly what social media, community and online collaboration is and how/why it’s different from what existed previously is sometimes challenging and more often than not frustrating. I just learned about this video, of Clay Shirky at this years Web 2.0 expo where he really breaks it down and makes sense of it all. One of the key takeaways is that media (both current and future) is not uni-directional but rather bi-directional. It’s no longer about simply consuming it, it’s really about consuming, creating and sharing. Another is: “Where is the mouse”. If you don’t know what that means, take a look at the video or at the very least read the transcript of Clay’s speech, I think you will get it.

My thanks to Jack McKee for posting about this video on his blog which brought it to my attention.