Web x.0 and beyond

I'm amazed and delighted at the huge response to my slideshow Web 3.0: The Way Forward? which started out as a brief analysis of current thinking on how the web might be extended beyond social tools into a more smart and responsive personal environment for learning. Before long it was an invited presentation given to a small gathering of enthusiastic teachers at a Vital Meet seminar. As I write this post, just 4 days after posting it up onto Slideshare, the slide set has already received 5,500 views and has been embedded into at least 20 other blogs and websites. Web 3.0 is clearly a topic that catches the imagination of many people in education and beyond. I like Stephen Downes' comments on my use of the term Web x.0 in the diagram adapted from Nova Spivak:

"The idea of Web X is that it combines web 2.0 (social web) and web 3.0 (semantic web) to create what I have called .... the semantic social web. But it's more than just that, because it takes these and moves them off the web and into your hand. And more than just that, because it's the web of data, the geoweb, augmented media, the 3D web, and more. The eXtended web - the web, extended from the internet, into your life".

This was an acknowledgement of a trend I had tried to highlight in my slideshow - that intelligent content and tools can now be operated from your mobile phone while you are on the move. I believe we will see this trend continue, with geomashups and augmented reality applications becoming more common place, enabling learners to navigate not only content on the web, but their actual, physical environments too.

George Siemens also weighed in with a response:

"The development of the semantic web, linked data, and open data, coupled with location-awareness, recommender systems, augmented reality, data overlays, and similar developments is having a dramatic impact on how people interact with information and each other".

He also is particularly focused on how these tools can be used to improve learning.

So it's not only Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 we need to consider, but extensions beyond these into a truly integrated, fully responsive and entirely personalised learning environment that fits into the palm of your hand. This is my vision for the future, but as I continually warn - predicting the future can be hazardous. I wrote about this problem in a recent post entitled 'Seeing the future'. The U.S. Mayor who in 1880 announced that one day every town in America would have a telephone was right, but also so far wide of the mark, it's almost laughable. So when people ask me when we will see all of these tools being used for learning, I simply smile and say - "we'll see". We know the tools exist (see: The Future is the Web) we just don't know when they will become economically viable enough for institutions to begin investing in them wholesale. Perhaps they never will. Perhaps it will be down to individual learners to purchase their own devices and applications. Perhaps this will be another aspect of the 'do it yourself' personal learning environment ethos we are all talking about.

Web x.0 and beyond by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.