Web 3.0: What’s To Like
I am finally getting a sense of how Web 3.0 may impact education. Having spent several wee hours of this morning Google and Bing trawling, I’ve gleaned that there are three features of the next web generation that have exciting implications for teachers and learners: mobility/ubiquity, intelligence and reality enhancement
Mobility and Ubiquity: 
It appears that we are going to be accessing the internet much more from the objects that travel with us through our daily life. Nokia projects a wearable mobile phone-computer . Other predictions suggest that the internet will come to us through more rather than fewer media – with connections imbedded in the objects we interact with as we go through our day – kitchen appliances, cars, apparel, …. At the extreme end of futurist thinking are cyborgians who suggest that our bodies will actually contain the means to access the internet through implants - but that’s probably Web 10.0.
Intelligence: 
Where phrases like “data integration” and “semantics” may seem too abstract to get anyone’s juices flowing, what they suggest really is exciting. For example, instead of being able to go to a website and get crime statistics for your city – a Web 2.0 innovation – you could instantly find out how your city’s child molestation incidents compared with those of any city in the world from Roman times to the present day – at a single click. Instead of spending hours conducting a literature search for a research paper, one click would deliver that background nicely packaged, cited and summarized so you could get onto the interesting work of your own research. The class that wanted to do a collaborative music project would not have to go through the cumbersome work of collecting data on song preferences – the web would know its members well enough to be able to suggest the perfect song automatically.
Reality Enhancement
: Perhaps the most innovative and enriching dimensions of Web 3.0 will be its power to bring virtual and real worlds together. One aspect of this is the creation of virtual worlds that more closely resemble our real ones – witness the movie Avatar, 3-D realms like Second Life, and the increasingly sophisticated use of simulation in worlds as diverse as medicine and the military. All of these presage even more ambitious and encompassing verisimilitudes to come. The flipside of more realistic virtual worlds is more virtual real worlds. I love the idea presented in the picture to the left – a visit to a graveyard becomes a an interaction with the departed – your own loved ones or historical figures. Some fear that the ability to enhance reality may result in serious invasions of privacy, as individuals could be assigned all kinds of visible tags as pictured below.
