Discussion: The original web was about information. Web 2.0 was about making it social. The next huge transformation of the web, enabled almost entirely by the intimacy and ever-presence of mobile devices, may be toward personalization – the Personal Web. Everybody talks about “big data”, but its most powerful potential will be to focus the broadest capacity of the Internet down to serving individual needs, hopes and dreams.
523 Inspiration: The massive personalization potentials of the Personal Web will be realized with mobile devices acting as mediators between the Internet, social networks, a personal cloud, communications systems, and the affordances of the everyday world. It will be the first universal engine for learner-centred education.
I feel very strongly about the promise of this concept as a mechanism for learner-focused education. I only learned the term “Personal Web” recently, but it is a great description of something that has been on my mind for a while now.
Particularly since 2020, when students experienced prolonged, significant disruptions to their educational and personal lives, I have heard colleagues, fellow parents, and friends bemoan the solipsism of “Kids Today”. It has become trendy to dismiss young learners as lazy or self-centered, lacking resilience or a will to “put in the work” to learn and interact in ways that seem familiar to older generations.
I don’t see it this way at all. First, I believe that any new generation of learners inevitably faces these same critiques. Their parents faced it 15 years ago when they were the first to grow up with video games, IM, and cell phones. What I think is happening, is we are seeing the first learners who are growing up in the Personal Web. They are not lazy or “needy”, as I heard students described last week by a program specialist in my district. I believe they are just hyper-aware of what contemporary digital tools and platforms are capable of, and are curating their online (especially mobile) experiences to optimize them to suit their needs. What feels like an insistence to have things catered to their needs isn’t based in vanity; it’s actually based on a surprisingly (to me) profound awareness of how new tech works. Are there still dangers, and do learners still need guidance? Should we have a vetting process for online tools that we welcome into our classroom? Yes, to both. However, I believe we can leverage them better than we have been, by following students’ lead.
As an educator, I think that the possibilities are endless. If I can find ways to create a framework to enable learners to tailor the tools and tech we use to meet their own goals and needs, it removes me as an intermediary and empowers them to take more control of their learning. Instead of seeing mobile tech, social networks and gaming as an impediment, perhaps they could be viewed as a means to make learning and interaction more personally meaningful for all involved. In my experience, when students find meaning in their learning the results are better for everyone.
Information, interaction, participation: Dr. Vogt has identified these as the first three stages of the existence of the digital Internet alongside 21st century humans on an interdependent planet Earth. We have moved from being receivors to interlocuters to content creators, watching the web grow up after we have conceived of, reared and raised her. If contemporary users apply affordances of this virtual tool to meet archaic human needs to commune and communicate, what would be a potential fourth stage? It may entail the more complete governance of computers over citizens as individuals increasingly relinquish rights, freedoms, and able-bodiedness to circuitboards dictating digital doctrines. The more technology is mindlessly used today, euphemised as experience design or personalized content awareness knowledge, the greater technological determinism will become tomorrow.