Web 3.0: The Way Forward?

Web 3.0: The way forward?

View more presentations from Steve Wheeler.

There were some interesting presentations at the Vital Meet seminar tonight, held at St James' School in Exeter. Chris Fuller (Follow him as @ChrisFullerisms on Twitter) spoke about Moblogging and argued that blogging while mobile fits into the ethos of a lot of young people. They enjoy living in the 'here and now' so would probably benefit from posting their observations and thoughts on the move rather than wait until later. Dan Roberts (@ChickenSaltash) reported on how his School, Saltash.Net in Cornwall is using a number of Web 2.0 tools to promote collaboration and creative approaches to learning in school. Peter Yeomans (@ethinking) from my own Faculty of Education at the University of Plymouth provoked some interesting discussion around the problems of trying to encourage undergraduate students to collaborate in online learning environments. Alistair Fitchett, an Assistant Head teacher at Tiverton High School in North Devon, gave an excellent opening talk on how his school is harnessing the power of new technologies to create excellence in learning. The team from The Welsh Connection, including St James' own Stephen Farmer (@StephenFarmer) spoke on how they were using a number of open source web tools to connect schools across the South of Wales and the West Country of England. I won't forget the pronouncement of the trio of awesome - Moodle, Elgg and Mahara. (I know that will please a number of people I know, not least @Networking_lady)!

My own presentation was entitled Web 3.0: The Way Forward? in which I attempted to paint a picture of future emerging technologies for learning. It's a very difficult task, because often we are wide of the mark when we try to predict technology trends. However, I called upon a number of my recent posts, such as e-Learning 3.0 and Anatomy of a PLE to illustrate what I think may happen in the next year or two, and how the Semantic and Pragmatic aspects of the Web, coupled with smart mobile devices may extend, enhance and transform the learning experience. I hope you find the slideshow useful and very much welcome your comments.

Related posts:

The eXtended Web and the Personal Learning Environment: Rita Kop
X Web: George Siemens
Web 3.0: The Way Forward? Stephen Downes


Web 3.0: The Way Forward? 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.

Multi-me

You can never have too many social networking connections, I reckon. So besides all my Flickring (4 accounts), Twittering, Plurking and Facebooking, and my occasional Slidesharing, Wikiing, Ninging and Elgging, I have also joined the International Edublogger Directory (check out their blog). It won't improve the dubious quality of my blog posts, nor will it make me smarter or better looking. But it might just provide me with some extra connections out there in the blogosphere, and as Cormier and others have made abundantly clear - it's not about nodes, it's the connections that are important.

So I am member 425 on the International Edublogger community now. That's my number and there are 424 others who joined before me and whom I can connect with now, however tenuously.

Got me thinking about personal identity though.... I'm known as Timbuckteeth on most of my virtual spaces (no, not telling), and Loudli Singh (the gangly and strangely silent Asian) in Second Life who just like me, steadfastly refuses to dance. But my personal identity remains largely unchanged, I think. I'm still rooted to the here and now, and still embodied for as long as this human frame I inhabit continues to pulse and breathe away. Yet my digital footprint continues to grow on the web, as do the personal footprints of many others. And with this gradual incursion comes a certain expectation - to continue to inform (and entertain) one's growing audience of casual observers and more interested 'followers' who drop in to see what I am doing and what I am saying about my life, my work, my research, my triumphs .... even my disasters. I am more than a number you see - I am also a series of digital artefacts, a set of tagged photographs, a random collection of videos others have put together and posted up onto Youtube. I am also a series of comments and tags in other people's spaces and a hierarchical sequence of search engine responses on Google. And of course most importantly, I am me - a father, son, husband, brother, friend.

There is a picture of me on my professional website - it was taken at the ALT-C Gala dinner in Leeds this year. I call it 'Multi-me' because the picture shows digital images on cameras held up against my real-world image. That's how I feel sometimes - spread between all the digital environments I visit and the real world I inhabit consistently, even when I don't feel I am totally here. This is member No. 425, going off to get some lunch....