Strange New Year

Looking again at Web 3.0 brought back memories of H806, New Year 2005/6, & a big debate I had with a colleague & fellow student about standards & metadata. I was convinced back then that structured blogging had no more chance of surviving than the proverbial snowball in hell, & indeed it quickly melted away. As did 'learning objects', those tasty nuggets which we spent a whole nine months digesting & regurgitating.

Laughed out loud at a 2001 paper by Cory Doctorow, dismissing the whole business as 'metacrap' . If only I'd seen this at the time. 

Web 3.0 continues to make me angry. For all its endorsement by Tim Berners-Lee, the concept seems entirely contrary to the spirit of the web (Webs 1.0 & 2.0) as we, the users, have adopted & made it:  messy, creative, unpredictable, free. Predictions that 'the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines' (Berners-Lee & Fischetti, 1999) may well have come true, but is that really what learning is about?

It's good to tie up these loose ends & still feel that 'It's fresh and new and happening''.