How the next stage of the Internet will impact how we learn and teach

How is the future development of the Internet going to affect how we learn and teach?

The question might seem trivial to those of you who never heard about the 'semantic web', which is going to drive us from Web 2.0 (building interactiveness on the web, which is basically what social media is currently doing) into Web 3.0 (where the Internet will 'know' what your are and what you want, and pro-actively serve it to you). In a way, Web 3.0 will act much more like a human brain, putting things in relation with each other without human having to tell it to build these relations... This might sound like science fiction, but if you're interested in the subject you should spend 15 minutes on the video beneath, it is quite revealing.

But how would this affect education? According to a recent blog post on onlineuniversities.com, it would enable the curriculum to be built on each person's specific knowledge and needs -a customized learning experience:

(from onlineuniversities.com:)

• Customizing presentation of information to accommodate different learning styles – Past experience of learner’s success rate in understanding and applying information from various styles of presentation will influence the ways in which current information is presented.
• Easy facilitation of homogeneous or heterogeneous groupings – Background knowledge, intellectual capacity and current understanding can be leveraged to group learners so that they can help each other learn best depending on their own prior success.
• Providing information about student background knowledge and how to activate it – Instructors often struggle with understanding the prior knowledge of all of their students. This technology makes it possible to adjust course materials to accommodate for specific previous learning experiences.
• Customizable assessments based on current and past educational experiences – If students have demonstrated previous proficiency in an area, assessments can account for that and change themselves to match a student’s current level of knowledge. With smart tests, there would be no possibility of testing students on information that they have not previously been exposed to.

...quite appealing...

For a good introduction to the 'semantic web', it's well worth spending 15 minutes with the video beneath: