what is a network anyway?

Two things going on today that are related to this process of preparing a presentation on my teaching / pedagogy. Rachel and I had a preliminary meeting about our "round table" for the art educator's conference and started to think about how we might present some ideas around web 2.0 without adopting a how.to approach. Once again we are turning to models or case studies that are drawn from our own practice. Rachel set up a fantastic wiki for digital.literacy last year and that has been an important starting place for me to think through web 2.0 technologies in the classroom. My experience has been limited and dubious (I'm really not the right person to be hosting this round table) but I do have a passion for networked resarch tools, and have been using delicious with senior students for 2 yrs now - as you can see over there... - so hope to be able to contribute something from this angle. But I'm worried that online searching and reading is more about using what you find than finding things to use. I hold onto a skepticism about user-generated content and have sat through one too many conference sessions on prod-users (although I think Axel Bruns does some fantastic work in this field) to really be able to celebrate web 2.0. I started to think about what we have lost since google took over our search engines and anyone could upload a photo...
There is the loss of the mystery and the shock of the dive (or surf as it was known) into the unknown. Works like Simon Penny's Babel replicate some of that surprise but outside of art contexts searching has become a process of finding what you already know is out there ... "there must be a you.tube video on that"... "someone will have written a tutorial on that" ... instead of a magical mystery tour into the unknown.
Second thing today is the opportunity to present to the panel in a conversational rather than top down way. This is exciting as it fits with my teaching philosophies and will enable me to actually practice what I preach (so to speak). I'm think about preparing a visual document that can be talked to and discussed with the panel, as we move through a sequence of key concepts. This also links into the work I'm doing with ADA as we prepare a conference format for June. We have outlined some basic principles... remote/ networked/ materials/ conversations/ ... that will become clearer as the remote keynotes are worked through.
Today then my key words are networked and conversations ... which of course form a definition of a 'learning community' a way of doing things where nodes interrelate and move and shift ... in the 1960s a networked learning environment would have been called a cybernetic system ... this was a different kind of ecology...