Next week I’ll be making a return visit to the OmniUpdate Users Conference to deliver the opening keynote address. Here is the title and abstract:
Perpetual Change: What’s Next for the Web?
“Technology marches on. As Moore’s law collides with Metcalfe’s law, the web we see today and the devices we use to access it will become unrecognizable. Will the promise of the social web, the mobile web, the semantic web, and the real-time web be fully realized? Will the singularity become reality? What are the implications of ubiquitous computing? It may be time to rethink a few things. Join Mark Greenfield as he looks into the crystal ball at the long-term future of the web and the implications for higher education.”
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My goal will be to take a look way out on the horizon to see what higher education web development might look like. I’m not talking the 50,000 foot view here, I’m talking the 500,000 foot view. So while I have a few ideas of my own, I’m interested in your thoughts. What does our future hold? What will the web look like? What kinds of things will higher ed web professional be working on?
And for my music friends, help me build my “Change” playlist which I’ll be using for background music before the start of my talk. (The title of the speech comes from a track from “The Yes Album”.)
I think about this a lot. I think the way we use the web will be very different than it is now. Right now, it’s still about print and about protecting the edifice of the campus. The future of the web — for better or worse — will be providing people with as much of the same experiences without having them leave where they are.
It’ll take a while to perfect, but the delivery of content digitally is already happening in more mature forms of media such as music, movies and such alike. Once it’s possible for folks to reach a person on demand to get the information they need or access to it, in a one-on-one tutorial sort of way, I think the entire business of delivering higher education on the web will arrive at a far different place than it is now.
Suggest the following helpful references as evidence of the next steps in web at the 500,000ft level as well as the the 5,000ft.
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Ray Kurzweil on predicting the future:
http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html?printable=1
“An analysis of the history of technology shows that technological change is exponential, contrary to the common-sense “intuitive linear” view. So we won’t experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century — it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today’s rate).”
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2010 Horizon Report:
http://wp.nmc.org/horizon2010/ and their six major technology trends in higher ed over the next 1-6 years. We can have all six of these *right now*, but are not major factors in higher ed quite yet.
1. mobile computing
2. open content (MIT’s OCW)
3. ebooks (etextbooks)
4. augmented reality
5. gesture-based UIs
6. visual data analysis (real-time, mapping, multi-dimensional)
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Kevin Kelly’s essential TED talk is a look back at the first 5,000 days of the web in order to make a reasonable extrapolation of the next 5,000 days of the web:
http://www.ted.com/talks/kevin_kelly_on_the_next_5_000_days_of_the_web.html
Kevin Kelly, TED, Dec 2007:
“…what we’re going to do in the next 5,000 days {of the web] — we’re going to give this machine a body. And the second thing is, we’re going to restructure its architecture. And thirdly, we’re going to become completely co-dependent upon it.
“First of all, we have all these things in our hands. We think they’re all separate devices, but in fact, every screen in the world is looking into the one machine. These are all basically portals into that one machine.
“The second thing is that — some people call this the cloud, and you’re kind of touching the cloud with this. And so in some ways, all you really need is a cloudbook. And the cloudbook doesn’t have any storage. It’s wireless. It’s always connected. There’s many things about it. It becomes very simple, and basically what you’re doing is you’re just touching the machine, you’re touching the cloud and you’re going to compute that way. So the machine is computing.
“And so every thing will be part of the web. So every item, every artifact that we make, will have embedded in it some little sliver of web-ness and connection, and it will be part of this machine, so that our environment — kind of in that ubiquitous-computing sense — our environment becomes the web. Everything is connected. […]
…there’s only one machine, and the web is its OS.”
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Dion Hinchcliffe is an enterprise IT analyst and blogger who connected the dots to support Kevin Kelly’s prediction about a “Web OS” — that that such a change is well underway in 2009:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Hinchcliffe/?p=771
Dion suggests that a Web OS is emerging because:
“The data, services, and even communities of the Web are now programmatic and can be incorporated and remixed into any other business or product at will.”
and Dion included this lovely structural map of the emerging “Web OS 2009”:
http://i.zdnet.com/blogs/web_os_2009_large_2.png?tag=col1;post-771
I also posted a collection of others’ thoughts about next steps for web in higher ed at:
http://www.fredonia.edu/pr/web/nextsteps.asp. However, these are more pragmatic and immediate than I think you’re seeking at the “500,000 foot view”.
Jonathan – thanks for the links. There are a couple of new tidbits for me to ponder.
Quoted words of Kevin Kellyfrom Dec2007 seems like a prophecy. Nowdays we already have access to the Internet from all our everyday life devices. I littel bit more and we will be ruled by it.
The conference looks really interesting.
Yes indeed! There is considerable evidence that our species will become subservient to the Internet,
This evidence, which is presented it my recent book “Unusual Perspectives” is drawn from chemistry and biology rather than computer science/AI from whence much of the hand-waving and wild speculation of futurism stems.
Certainly the event usually described by the rather silly buzz-word “Singularity” (“phase transition” is a much better metaphor) will be upon us within a decade or so. And we are already witnessing the self-assembly of the Internet into the next life-form on this planet.
It is an inevitable extension of the evolutionary life processes demonstrated by genetic evolution and the subsequent evolution of technology for which our species is a vehicle.
As we are unlikely to be competing for resources with this new inorganic life-form the subservience could be quite benign or even advantageous to us. Symbiosis is quite common in nature and can work well.
Of course, if we pose a threat to the new entity (I like to call her Netty) or her progeny we will almost certainly be eliminated. Not a hard job for an organism having intimate links to the technology on which we will be so very dependant as may be expected at that stage – just a matter of “pulling the plug” really.
Much more on such matters to be found in “Unusual Perspectives”, which can be freely downloaded from the eponymous website.
Eleven more Internet prognostications:
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/opinions/view/opinion/11-Ways-Tomorrows-Internet-Will-Change-Everything-2876
Includes these bullet points and an article associated with each point. Higher ed folks take note of bullet #5.
1. The Cloud Will Take Over
2. Perfect Understanding of ‘Now’
3. Replace Religion?
4. Computers Get Bigger, Not Smaller
5. Web Will Kill Colleges
6. Complete Loss Of Privacy
7. Corporations as Public/Private Arbiters
8. Fame Replaced By Micro-Fame
9. ‘Lifestreams’ Will Be Central Medium
10. Return to Pre-Modern ‘Dream Logic’
11. Will We Control It?
Journalist Nicholas Carr doubts it. “There are times when human beings are able to correct the bias of a technology. There are other times when we make the bias of an instrument our own. Everything we’ve seen in the development of the Net over the past 20 years, and, indeed, in the development of mass media over the past 50 years, indicates that what we