Anyway Web 3.0 is apparently just around the corner (2010 – see Nova Spivack’s timeline below). Also known as the ‘Intelligent web’ or the ‘semantic web’ this current incarnation is even to be an evolution on the previous in which the web becomes more intelligent in the way it looks for and receives information – it does a lot of work for you, (Good Old Wikipedia Definition). And because it has not arrived yet there’s no fixed definition. Indeed around a year ago I recall the next step upward from Web 2.0 as being ‘3D web’ which encapsulates virtual world elments into browser, Photosynth is a good example (Web Link).

To be honest I’m more interested in the notion of Web 4.0 which is predicted by Nova Spivack at Radar Technologies to arrive around the year 2020 (How the WebOS Evolves? – Web Link and the image below). At present Web 4.0 is characterised by intelligent personal agents which in our current context could be represented by the people patterns and profile elements that Amazon use to recommend purchases. In terms of education and e-learning we might be seeing a situation in which the student progresses along a learning pathway not only influenced by their degree/tutors but also by who they know, their interests, career objectives, progression in particular subjects etc. And I think this might not be too far off.

Click here to see the Nova Spivack time line

The key question is however how (if possible) could this be accommodated to achieve a sound education, (in particular I’m also thinking of how this relates to the notion of ‘pedagogy 2.0’ in my previous post)?

And another issue is what if the agents get it wrong? For example I’ve recently bought book on dog breeding as a one-off present only to find that Amazon now continually throws similar book items to me.

And web 4.0, if truly embodied by people patterns, also runs the risk of trapping you into a constricted pathway.

Susan Smith Nash sums this up in her blog post (Web 3.0, Web 4.0 and Personal Agents: Will They Open or Restrict Choice? – Web Link ). She defines web 4.0: “Web 4.0 will, in theory, include an array of sensors that will gather information from one’s environment and use them to create a deep profile of your behaviours and activities.” So there are learning potentials here.

However she also observes “However, will you be held hostage to your old patterns? Will the information actually restrict your options?”. An important point as web 4.0 might not be too appealing. She ends with a warning “Clearly, the tendency in the future might be to simply repeat and reinforce what one already knows, with expansions, revisions, and tightening focus. The ability to branch out and think about obscure, unrelated, even random things can and will be seriously constricted in the world of Web 4.0 as envisioned now.”.

As my fellow cell mate Ian says: ‘If web 2.0 is defined as user generated content, then is web 4.0 content generated users?’

As always happy to receive comments.

Short paper which briefly looks at the opportunities offered by web 2.0 technology (wikis, blogging etc.) in terms of enabling students to become content creators. Consideration is given the notion of ‘pedagogy 2.0’ which is essentially a learner centred environment founded on constructivist principles.

“Pedagogy 2.0 is defined by:

• Content: Microunits that augment thinking and cognition by offering diverse perspectives and representations to learners and learner-generated resources that accrue from students creating, sharing, and revising ideas;
• Curriculum: Syllabi that are not fixed but dynamic, open to negotiation and learner input, consisting of bite-sized modules that are interdisciplinary in focus and that blend formal and informal learning;
• Communication: Open, peer-to-peer, multifaceted communication using multiple media types to achieve relevance and clarity;
• Process: Situated, reflective, integrated thinking processes that are iterative, dynamic, and performance and inquiry based;
• Resources: Multiple informal and formal sources that are rich in media and global in reach;
• Scaffolds: Support for students from a network of peers, teachers, experts, and communities; and
• Learning tasks: Authentic, personalized, learner-driven and learner-designed, experiential tasks that enable learners to create content.”

And the outcome is: “With this learner-based, communal, media-rich, flexible approach, Pedagogy 2.0 uses social software tools to enable the development of dynamic communities of learning through connectivity, communication, and participation. “
It is brief but does a good job of raising the possibilities of such environments. A good staring point for discussion.

Having said that a few challenges need to be worked out: how do you protect what is private; are we always safe sharing; how do we earn a living if everyone is sharing their ideas and (my favourite) what if is Wikipedia is crap.

“You are what you share”

Steve believes that “the read/write Web, or what we are calling Web 2.0, will culturally, socially, intellectually, and politically have a greater impact than the advent of the printing press.” In particular he emphasises as to how difficult it will be to imagine the changes that will take place as a consequence of the flowering of, what he aptly terms, “two-way nature of the Internet”.

He identifies ten trends which he thinks will have particular importance for education and learning and then outlines seven steps which he thinks educators ought to be taking to make a difference.

I’ll outline the trends here which includes some points of my own (remixing as Steve points out in web 2.0 speak) but for detail I recommend visiting his post:

Trend 1: A New Publishing Revolution. The web is no longer a one-way medium where the user passively reads content but rather it offers instant self publication. In other words the web is two-way, it allows the user to create content and in doing so engage in creativity. I think the last aspect is the most important as it doesn’t matter what the outcome as long as the user experiences a level of creativity – educationally web 2.0 enables the process rather than the product.

Trend 2: A Tidal Wave of Information – and no time to act. As with the first trend this has been said before but it is always worth re-stating. As Steve notes for people over a certain age their childhood involved a lot of hard work having to look for and obtain information. Similarly for university education prior to web 2.0. Whereas now there is so much information on the net we have to spend more time sifting and filtering content in order to isolate quality material. And even when we ‘plug’ into trusted information providers, as I do through online subscription, the problem becomes another as we are now in receipt of quality information at great quantity. There’s not enough time to reflect on the information and adapt it or adopt it into working practice as necessary unless you ‘unplug’ yourself for a while and start to deliberately ignore incoming good quality content. It’s like being at a very good conference every day. Information incontinence.

Trend 3: Everything Is Becoming Participative. In other words everyone can get in on the act. Steve’s example is Amazon in which participation is integral to its system of selling books. As with Steve usually my decision to buy a book is based on the comments left by other readers. Another example is the move database IMDB (www.imdb.com) in which I check out the reviews left by joe public and base my viewing preferences / dvd purchasing choices accordingly. In each case generally I skim through the comments/reviews and gain an aggregated sense of the overall feeling for the item. Interestingly for both cases I found that the reviews left by the public can on occasion be more thoughtful and insightful than those left by so called professional critics, (so much so that last year I gave up on my 17 year long subscription to Empire movie magazine – as the content tended to be out of date and the reviews comparatively uninformed).

Steve also notes the tracking ability of Amazon in which the user’s browsing and purchasing patterns are analysed and recommendations are made accordingly. This is both powerful and sophisticated. For example for people who have viewed the same book you are currently viewing Amazon is able to show you the book they actually ended up buying, e.g. 60% of people who viewed book A went on to buy book B. I suspect in the very near future MLEs will be using similar people pattern processes for connecting learner’s to content (and its creator) which they would normally miss, informing module choices and suggesting career options.

Trend 4: The New Pro-sumers. This is in relation to the way in which knowledge is generated though collaboration between the ‘producer’, i.e. the company and the ‘consumer’, i.e. the customer. Steve points out that companies are increasingly eliciting R&D work from a broader public. From an educational point of view this could relate to learners generating content for a course in association with the tutor, particularly where the student is returning from field experience or is a current practitioner in the field.

Trend 5: The Age of the Collaborator. Steve puts this across very well “The era of trusted authority (Time magazine, for instance, when I was young) is giving way to an era of transparent and collaborative scholarship (Wikipedia). The expert is giving way to the collaborator, since 1 + 1 truly equals 3 in this realm..”. And with collaboration we have critiquing, communication and competition as differing views fight it out and merge apart or together.

Trend 6: An Explosion of Innovation. Giving credit to his brother Steve considers as how innovation rarely comes from a single individual but rather through the application of knowledge from one field to another, specifically when collaborators of diverse backgrounds are involved bringing in particular experiences. My thoughts are not necessarily related to this but it did get me thinking about possible future forms of knowledge generation. Future MLEs will, through adopting social networking functionality, encourage the student to create and become part of communities whose membership will be from a variety of backgrounds, life experiences and expertise. As such the student may seek advice, be influenced by and or collaborate with the membership to produce knowledge with a unique spin. I’m not necessarily thinking in terms of traditional assignments but with reference to the CPD, PDP, ePortfolio material.

Trend 7: The World Gets Even Flatter and Faster. Flatter in terms of knowledge being freely available for access and study. For example MIT have released over 1800 open courses and as Steve notes that’s only the start.

Trend 8: Social Learning Moves Toward Center Stage. Steve cites John Seely Brown’s observation in that TRUE (my caps) learning actually takes place in the hallway, through social interaction and discussion, rather than within the lecture itself, (www.johnseelybrown.com). Essentially according to Steve the distinction between the “lecture” room and the “hallway” is diminishing. Interestingly I’ve seen this reported elsewhere particularly within Second Life in which distance based leaner students actually inter mingle and communicate with each other in virtual hallways or lobby outside of the virtual lecture room (and after the lecture has been delivered). As a somewhat obvious caveat some learning does take place within the lecture however but, and if we’re talking about a standard vicarious lecture, deeper understanding is reached only through two-way dialogue and social interaction, i.e. with the student as contributor.

Trend 9: The Long Tail. Basically the end of knowledge creation solely through the specialist. With the advert o user generated content sites such as Wikipedia, YouTube and Flickr there’s a great deal of information sources out there (and obviously there are issues of quality). But likewise the freedom that allows such content to be easily generate and passed on to others means that passionate students can also become involved in knowledge generation and sharing. They now have a space in which they can create content but also through social means air their views, issue and defend challenges. Simply put the student can get connected with the subject and stamp their own authority on it. So it’s not essentially about the academic quality of the output but more about the internal development the student gets from creating the output.

Trend 10: Social Networking Really Opens Up the Party. Blogs and wikis led the way to user-created content but “the party really began when sites that combined several Web 2.0 tools together created the phenomenon of “social networking.”” In other words blogs and wikis although very empowering, and in the case of the wiki inclusive, do not push the information outwards. The reader has to visit the wiki or the blog. However social networking hinges on users getting together with shared interests and goals. As such information created within these networks flows towards and outwards from the users.
The points are above are summaries mixed in with my own observations. For the original post click here

Not actually about Facebook per se and neither related to my quest for learning and teaching examples in Facebook.

Basically a video created by Michael Wesch and 200 students ( Kansas State University). It looks at how students view education today. The content and conclusions, including how many hours students spend on particular tasks during the day, are based on a simple 1 question survey titled “The Vision of Students Today”. The tutor asked “What is it like being a student today?”. He set the survey up using Google documents and added the 200 students who then made 367 edits to the answers.

Some answers are interesting and personal: ‘18% of the staff know my name”; ”I will read 8 books this year, 23000 webpages and 1281 Facebook profiles”; “I will write 42 pages of for class this semester and over 500 pages of email”.

Comments please!

Michael Wesch also produced the excellent ” Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us” below:

View list

I’ll start by linking the original presentation on which ‘shift happens’ is based. Its entitled ‘From Gutenburg to
Gates and Beyond’ and the authors is Ian Jukes. It’s a very good and thought provoking paper on the future of education and some great insights and truly staggering observations with regards to the rate of information generation and the growth of internet. Full paper here.

Next up is PowerPoint presentation entitled ‘Did you Know?’ by Karl Fisch which includes the key elements of Jukes paper together with additonal information – again relating to the rapid growth of knowledge in itself set against a background of shifting change. PowerPoint link here.

So now I’ve just come across the ‘Shift Happens’ PowerPoint which in the words of its creator, Jeff Brenman, is ‘is a stylization of a slideshow originally created by Karl Fisch, examining globalization and America’s future in the 21st century. It is designed to stand alone, without having to be presented in person.’. Again the same key principles but with some more additional relevant information.

[slideshare id=33834&doc=shift-happens-23665&w=425]

And of course on top of all this there are various ‘sequels’ in YouTube etc.

This illustrates one of the key points I talk about when running workshops on blogs and web 2.0 and that is information on the web frees freely and rapidly while at the same time is subject to almost evolutionary environmental pressures in so far as the content is constantly judged and rated with the ‘fittest’ content spreading far and wide while relatively less fit ideas fail to do . Not only that but we can see as to how ideas become adapted to keep pace with current issues while still retaining its relevance and original point of interest.

Web 2.0 not so user-generated after all?
By Reuters

Sobering and brief article on web 2.0 in terms of users viewing and adding their own content. 3 of the main web 2.0 sites are considered:

youTube: “A tiny 0.16 per cent of visits to Google’s top video-sharing site, YouTube, involve users seeking to upload video for others to watch, according to a study of online surfing data by Bill Tancer, an analyst with web audience measurement company Hitwise.”

Flickr: “Similarly, only two-tenths of one per cent of visits to Flickr, a popular photo-editing site owned by Yahoo!, are to upload new photos, the Hitwise study found.”

So as the report says the vast majority of internet suers can be likened to couch potatoes. People who like to watch rather than create. That said collaboratively created content sites such as wikipedia are prooving to be a different story.

Wikipedia: “Wikipedia, the anyone-can-edit online encyclopedia, is the one exception cited in the Hitwise study: 4.6 per cent of all visits to Wikipedia pages are to edit entries on the site.”

Which is very good. The report goes on to say that despite the above are still showing huge gains in internet traffic: “Visits by web users to the category of participatory web 2.0 sites account for 12 per cent of US web activity, up from only two per cent two years ago, the study showed.”

And: “Web 2.0 photo-sharing sites now account for 56 per cent of visits to all online photo sites. Of that, Photobucket alone accounts for 41 per cent of the traffic, Hitwise data shows.”"

This is backed by recent stats released by comScore, particularly regarding social networking and blog sites.

Social Networking and Major Consumer Sites See Marked Traffic Increases During the Month of March

comScore have released the latest stats growth for Feb/March. Social networking sites are showing huge gains.

“Several social networking sites showed notable gains in March, including Tagged.com, which became the UK’s biggest gainer with a 226-percent increase to more than 3 million visitors. In addition, Facebook.com grew 38 percent to 2.7 million visitors, and Six Apart sites grew 30 percent to 3.5 million visitors. Bebo.com grew 9 percent to 7.8 million visitors, and is the only one of these sites to be represented in the top 20 list.” Wikipedia by the way grew by 6% receiving 11.9 million UK unique visitors, (probably bad news for teachers who dont want their students to use the site).

More stats here

Thanks to Sue Heale.