We are a group of four doctoral students in the Technical Communication and Rhetoric program at Texas Tech University. The purpose of this project was to solicit others’ ideas about how personal agency and social media are used in the classroom to create knowledge. Through sites such as Facebook and Twitter, as well as through email, we distributed a survey to answer questions geared towards the use of Web 2.0 technologies within academia, and how that related to the rhetoric of personal agency. From this survey, we completed our analysis and then began to catalogue information pertinent to Web 2.0 technologies in the classroom through resources such as Diigo and Zotero. The www.metaAcademia.com website was initially created for us to collect our ideas and resources, and is intended to be a place where other academics can add their voice, collaborate with us, share data, provide interpretations, and seek out resources. Additionally, through the website we invite these users in helping us to define the meaning behind Web 2.0 in academia and what the ramifications are of introducing and using these new tools. This blog is an extension of that project. This is the beginning of what we hope will be a continuing collaboration, and a process that will evolve and grow.
