A reflection on Weller’s Web 2.0 chapter in 25 Years of Ed Tech: how the web’s democratic promise gave way to a business model built on data and control, and what that means for ed tech today.
The 2006 – Web 2.0 chapter of Weller’s 25 Years of Ed Tech and the accompanying Between the Chapters podcast conversation with Bryan Alexander and Alexandra Pickett cover some ed tech contributions that promised to democratize the web while also quietly building the business model that now defines surveillance capitalism. Two lessons stood out, one immediately relevant, one that conflicts with current practice.
Lesson 1
If you’re not paying for it, then you’re the product.
(Weller, 2020, p. 93)
The web started as one of the most democratic tools ever invented, letting anyone publish and access ideas with no gatekeeper. But the “free” model that powered Web 2.0 carried a hidden cost. Weller’s chapter revisits the idea that when a service is free, the company makes money by collecting your personal data, tracking your habits, and selling your attention to advertisers (Weller, 2020, p. 93). Alexander notes this isn’t new; it goes back to television, and even to 1920s radio before licensing consolidated it (Pasquini, 2021). That pattern keeps repeating: an open medium attracts users, then gets monetized, and sometimes monopolized, by whoever can scale it. With social media, you at least retain some control: Kris Shaffer could delete 40,000 tweets in 2017, even if digital traces remained somewhere she couldn’t fully erase (Shaffer, 2017). With generative AI, our data, be it writing, images, voice, or analytics, is absorbed into training processes we can’t inspect, audit, or meaningfully opt out of after the fact. The “product” relationship hasn’t gone away; it’s gotten less visible and less reversible.
The lesson: every time a new “free” ed-tech tool shows up, should we be asking ourselves: who is the customer here, and who is the product, before asking what the tool can do pedagogically?
Lesson 2
Small pieces, loosely joined.
(Pasquini, 2021)
In Between the Chapters, Pickett describes stitching together NetVibes, blogs, VoiceThread and other third-party online tools outside her Learning Management System (LMS) because she “hated equally every LMS” (Pasquini, 2021). Pickett explains that LMS locked away everything students created once the term ended, whereas she wanted her students to create in the open, on the public web so they could build a real digital footprint and retain ownership of their work. That’s the Web 2.0 ethos: decentralized, student-owned, messy but authentic.
That contradiction hasn’t gone away, and if anything, it may have gotten worse. Institutions today are consolidating further, not opening up: locked-down browsers for exams, student analytics, plagiarism and AI-detection tools, and now even AI writing tools, all bundled inside the LMS rather than out on the open web. The justification has shifted from user convenience to safety, privacy, surveillance and compliance, but the effect is the same one Pickett was fighting in 2006: students create inside a system, and then it disappears the moment the course ends.
We learned from Web 2.0 that free capitalist platforms extract value from users by keeping their data. Institutions responded to that lesson by closing the walls even tighter around students’ own work, rather than by helping students build something that belongs to them and can’t be exploited.
The lesson: Is locking everything into one platform actually protecting students, or are we just trading exploitation for control?
References
Pasquini, L. (Host). (2021, February 4). Between the chapters: Web 2.0 [Audio podcast episode]. In 25 years of Ed Tech: The serialized audio version. OpenEd. https://25years.opened.ca/2021/02/06/between-the-chapters-web-2-0/
Shaffer, K. (2017, February 2). I deleted 40,000 tweets last week. Here’s why (and how). Kris Shaffer. https://kshaffer.github.io/2017/02/i-deleted-tweets/
Weller, M. (2020). 25 Years of Ed Tech | Athabasca University Press. Aupress.Ca. https://doi.org/10.15215/aupress/9781771993050.01
Great post! Your connection between Web 2.0 surveillance capitalism and AI is spot on. However, what makes AI extraction distinct from human learning is that AI doesn’t synthesize ideas through lived experience or tacit knowledge—it simply amalgamates explicit human labor at scale, severing intellectual lineage.
While I share Pickett’s frustration with the LMS “walled garden,” there is a practical counter-perspective. Closed platforms aren’t just about control; they address real operational needs:
-Academic Integrity & Privacy: Locking forums protects student work from search engine indexing, commercial AI scrapers, and future plagiarism, while maintaining strict privacy compliance.
-Faculty Workload: Open web models force instructors to continuously redesign assignment prompts to prevent cheating—an unsustainable workload at scale.
-Compliance & Records: While students retain their final assignment files and receive a grade, the LMS ensures strict adherence to student privacy laws (like FERPA), even if it sadly archives the relational peer discussions once the term ends.
Perhaps the real challenge isn’t choosing between the open web and the LMS, but finding ways to design “renewable” assignments inside existing systems that give students lasting agency without exposing them or burning out faculty.