The Future of the Internet III - Looking at 2020

The entire report can be downloaded in PDF here:

Here are the key findings on the survey of experts by the Pew Internet & American Life Project that asked respondents to assess predictions about technology and its roles in the year 2020:

The mobile device will be the primary connection tool to the internet for most people in the world in 2020.

The transparency of people and organizations will increase, but that will not necessarily yield more personal integrity, social tolerance, or forgiveness.

Voice recognition and touch user-interfaces with the internet will be more prevalent and accepted by 2020.

Those working to enforce intellectual property law and copyright protection will remain in a continuing arms race, with the crackers who will find ways to copy and share content without payment.

The divisions between personal time and work time and between physical and virtual reality will be further erased for everyone who is connected, and the results will be mixed in their impact on basic social relations.

Next-generation engineering of the network to improve the current internet architecture is more likely than an effort to rebuild the architecture from scratch.

The Critics Need a Reboot. The Internet Hasn't Led Us Into a New Dark Age.

Human nature hasn't changed much, yet, and another predictable wave of stories about how new things are making us stupid is hitting the media. But some of us are more in tuen with this author's take: "The explosion of knowledge represented by the Internet and abetted by all sorts of digital technologies makes us more productive and gives us the opportunity to become smarter, not dumber. . . . [however] It's naive to think that the digital age will magically remedy stupidity. We need better schools as well as a renewed commitment to reason and scientific rigor so that people can distinguish knowledge from garbage. The Web is not an obstacle in this project. It's an unparalleled tool for generating, finding, and sharing sound information. What's moronic is to assume that it hurts us more than it helps."

Frontline: Growing Up Online

PBS' Frontline's website for its program, 'Growing Up Online', includes many resources beyond the full program that was broadcast on television. But it also includes the full television program in streaming video format. Those of us who've lived through the last 15 years or so in higher education have been astonished by the changes. But the next ten years may be even more transformative in terms of the the expectations and capabilities of our future students.

Web 2.0 Is Redefining What and How and With Whom We Learn

A very lucid presentation of a shift in learning epistomolology. This is a must-read for those who want or need to peer into the next ten years of change in higher education:

At present, the response of most educators is to ignore or dismiss this epistemological clash. Many faculty force students to turn off electronic devices in classrooms; instead, students could be using search tools to bring in current information and events related to the class discussion. Some faculty ban the use of online sources and deride the validity of any perspective that does not come from a disciplinary scholar. Many see social networking sites as useless or dangerous and do not recognize the diagnostic value of folksonomies for understanding the language and conceptual frameworks that students bring to the classroom. This refusal to acknowledge the weaknesses of the Classical perspective and the strengths of Web 2.0 epistemologies is as ill-advised as completely abandoning Classical epistemology for Web 2.0 meaning-making.