updated 2013 Sept 16
 
Brief discussion of Web 2.0, and Web 3.0

 
Web 1.0 . you read an article about pick-up trucks.
Web 2.0 you express your opinion, on a social media website, about your experience of driving a particular pick-up truck and upload a photo of you standing beside one
Web 3.0 you want to buy a pick-up truck and use customized search agent to find text, audio or video from people (beginning within your existing network of social media contacts) that have made comments on, or have driven the make and model you are interested in - and it provides these search results while excluding ads, pop ups and pop overs for trucks and truck services not in your immediate geographic area.

former student Drew Porteous added 2013 Sept 16
Web 1.0 . I can see it
Web 2.0 I can touch it
Web 3.0 I can use it.

….. “New Web 2.0 technologies and websites, such as a blog, wiki or YouTube, make new demands on learning, and they provide new supports to learning, even as they dismantle some of the learning supports upon which education depended in the past.” (Duffy 2007). Canada’s east coast internet guru Stephen Downes (2008) argues the case for YouTube in teaching more simply by saying “”The educational use of a site like YouTube should be apparent”.

What are some of these new demands on learning – Prof. Bill Ashraf of the University of Sussex in a 2009 paper titled "Teaching the Google-eyed YouTube generation" discussed how the Universities in the UK are dealing with enourmous challenges as they deal with the concept of education as a “consumer product” and face an intense competitive environment. In talking about how faculty use Web 2.0 technologies such as YouTube, Ashraf (2009) explains that universities “are facing enormous challenges to establish competitive advantages whilst attending to customer need and focus”. One aspect of the “enourmous challenges” faced by universities in the UK, and I would submit Canada, the U.S. and many other regions, is an increasingly cultural diverse student population that employs IT and communication technology on the most up-to-date devices. Asraf’s paper not only explores the usefulness of integrating YouTube into teaching and learning as we move through the Web 2.0 age, but also discusses how YouTube and other social media can be incorporated in giving voice to students from a diverse range of ethnic and linguistic backgrounds. Keeping in mind however that although YouTube is seen by many (the author of this paper included) to have academic possibilities, it was launched and spread primarily “as a public video-sharing website where people can experience varying degrees of engagement with videos, ranging from casual viewing to sharing videos in order to maintain social relationships” (Lange 2008)

As part of the discussion of using YouTube, it might be necessary to mention how the term “Web 2.0” is sometimes applied and introduce the relevance of “Web 3.0”. Such a brief discussion will be helpful when it is understood that early discussions of YouTube were covered under the heading of “Web 2.0” or “Web 2.0 Technologies”.

When Tim Berners-Lee told the BBC in 2005, how he envisioned the web in the early 1990’s, he is widely quoted as saying that he “intended the Web in his vision as "a collaborative medium, a place where we [could] all meet and read and write” Yet despite Berners-Lee’s suggestion that web content should be built for collaboration, early commercial development of the web was product oriented and it wasn’t until 2004 that web gurus such as Tim O’Reilly put forth the term “Web 2.0”  to describe a later generation of web usage aimed at circumstances where the viewer of web content could interact with the entity that created such content and together additional new content could be made and read, heard or viewed. Along with the increased desire to interact with web content creators, Web 2.0 also came about partly due to the technological developments in computer processing that allowed more complex software programs to run on computers and higher bandwidth that allowed access to such programs on smaller and more mobile devices.

“User-centred web phenomenon such as Web 2.0 such as blogging, social video sharing, (exemplified by YouTube) and collective editing (wikis or Wikipedia as an example) are disrupting traditional ideas about how students interact online and how content is generated, shared, and distributed.” (Duffy 2007)

The phrase “Web 2.0” has been used and abused for 6 years and during that time the computer servers upon which the World Wide Web have been flooded with millions and millions of pages of text content, audio clips and videos. While it has been interesting that so many people have contributed to such building, one of the consequences is that information, one can use to make a decision, is more and more difficult to find – leading to the concept of “Web 3.0”. Still in its infancy, and with definitions changing monthly as more and more companies and web experts evangelize about the benefits of the concept, Web 3.0 does not have a simple definition.
 

What can be said about Web 3.0 is the problem it attempts to solve – TMI – too much information which is not easily accessible from which people can make “extractions” to help them in their daily tasks.

The web is growing at a rate which is almost rendering it unusable....meaning that too much information is being put online, which mkes it almost impossible to find content relevant to what people need to know.
 
One of the reasons for TMI being put on the web is that the form of the information is changing. A few years ago, most web based content posted was text (words) and images, then audio became popular with all the music sharing networks, now, since YouTube + better quality cameras in iPhones and Samsung Galaxies, we have 25 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute

`The basics of Web 3.0 are a series of inventions (software and hardware) that allow users to use more “natural language” in making queries of databases. In a 2006 interview to the International Herald Tribune, Tim Berners-Lee told journalist Victoria Shannon that “Web 3.0” will have a component which is now (2010) referred to as the “Semantic Web”. Referring to events that might culminate in 2015, Berners-Lee suggested that a Semantic Web would make it much easier to find what we are looking for in the context of the great explosion of web content – a point directly related to the growth of Social Media constructs such as YouTube (Shannon 2006).


Notes

Web 2.0 is associated with Tim O'Reilly because of the O'Reilly Media Web 2.0 conference in 2004



Bibliography

Ashraf, B. (2009). Teaching the Google-eyed YouTube generation. Education + Training, Vol. 51 Iss: 5/6, pp.343 – 352

Berners-Lee, Tim (2005). “Berners-Lee on the read/write web”
BBC Newsnight's Mark Lawson, 9 August 2005. Retrieved Dec 8, 2010 from  http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4132752.stm

Duffy, P. (2007). Engaging the YouTube Google-Eyed Generation: Strategies for using Web 2.0 in Teaching and Learning. The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong Proceedings of the 6th European Conference on e-Learning

Lange, P. (2008) Publicly Private and Privately Public: Social Networking on YouTube. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. Vol. 13, 1, pp. 361–380.

Shannon, Victoria (2006). “A 'more revolutionary' Web”. International Herald Tribune. 2006 May 24. Retrieved Dec 07 2010 from http://www.scribd.com/doc/2021419/A-More-Revolutionary-Web-Print-Version-International-Herald-Tribune



- from an excerpt in a paper written by W.T.G. Richardson for one of his PhD courses (2011)
- this paper dealt with professors using YouTube for teaching
- in the paper there was some brief discussion of Web 2.0 and Web 3.0
 


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