Week 3: The Web evolution: Web 1.0, Web 2.0, Web 3.0

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Communication has always been one of the most important issues for humankind. Every attempt to improve the way we communicate has been supported through history so we have had several ways of interacting in written or spoken form by means as the newspapers, the phones, cellphones, and computers and recently with the appearance of the internet as means of communication.  

Consequently, our way of interacting with other people has changed through the years, and it has certainly affected the way in which we live today and definitely it will affect our future as well.

The launching of web 1.0 gave us the opportunity of somehow have accesses to a new kind of information that will be always available for you if you just had and internet connection. However, this format only gave the chance to few people to communicate things. Let’s say that users could only read the information presented without having any chance of replying or making a comment or just adding extra information about a certain topic.

Later on, a new way of communicating and interacting with people changed our lives; the launching of web 2.0 allowed the interaction of people all around the world without restrictions of distance, languages or schedules. Social networks, digital newspapers, blogs, podcasts, and other means of communication in the web are they new forms of getting information that we are used to nowadays.

Nowadays, another type of web has come to change our world once again. Now we are talking about the web 3.0. Innovation here is featured by the fact that the internet has become mobile and now is accessible almost everywhere by the use of other tools different from the computer. Smart phones, tablets, smart TV, are just some of the multiple smart devices that we have today, but it seems that more is coming as the hyperconectivity where almost all products will be interconnected and we will be surrounded by information all the time.

So far, the evolution of the web interaction has benefit language learners and teacher as new resources are applied to language teaching and they can have contact with real language, native speakers and ever learners with a different L1, so there is a rich interaction in the web that let students acquire new vocabulary and even have new experiences that can’t be offered in the classroom.

All these improvements in communication have certainly influenced the way people learn today as well. The new technologies offer a wide variety of means and options for learning some of them are:

Videos

Tutorials

Learning platforms

Virtual colleges

Webminars

Online masters, among others.

However, it seems that some institutions and teachers do not seem to understand well how to include these technologies in the daily practice in the classroom and consequently, they feel threatened and do not accept the inclusion of these elements in their environments. But, beyond criticizing these people it is necessary to analyze the inclusion of technology in the classroom in order to make it worthy and not to build a society dependent of technology. In my opinion, we as teachers must balance and combine in an appropriate form technology and traditional education in order to provide students with the necessary tools to live in our new societies without losing our human touch.  

Here there is a video that explains the evolution of the web