Web 3.0?

For many years now, the idea of "Web 2.0" has been an widely established one, with social media being among the forefront aspects, along with increased participation and interactivity with 'ordinary' users, as opposed to a small 'Web Elite' which previously made up the majority of online content creation.

So what will Web 3.0 look like?

This is significant for us in education, because I feel like we've only begun to get to grips with Web 2.0. And some school divisions still seem to be trying the best they can to ignore the existence of social media entirely. Most likely, just as educators are coming to grips with the current model of the Internet, the paradigm will shift again. But what will it shift into?

I think we've started to move towards the model already, with Internet access being freed form the constraints of traditional computer equipment and put into increasingly portable forms. Google is experimenting with glasses that can surf the Internet. Many people rely largely on their phones as their primary source of Internet browsing. This trend towards micro-sizing and ubiquity will likely only continue.

The user-driven model of 2.0 will likely continue to grow and thrive, moving out from simple formats such as sharing text, images and videos and into more complex fields such as software and game design. Powerful tools to make online content already exist and many of them are free. The tyranny of paid software has started to crack to a huge extent, with free models such as Google Drive and OpenOffice rapidly supplanting traditional software.

I don't know what exactly Web 3.0 will look like, but some of the trends are already forming. I think another change will be more social, as people become more and more invested into their online selves. Already, the 'Wild West' elements of the Internet are fading rapidly and are being replaced with more regulated models, by various agencies certainly, but also by users themselves.

In any case, it's going to be interesting to see what happens, and how we cope with it.