I’m over it. Everywhere you look, it’s Web 2.0, Web 2.0 … Some of the staff at my place of work didn’t even know there was a Web 1.0 and I don’t have the heart to tell them that there wasn’t until Web 2.0 came along.
Now, just as they’re coming to grips with Web 2.0, they’ve learnt from Google University that Web 3.0 is just around the corner. I don’t have the heart to tell them that so far, it’s actually just Web 2.1, but everyone inflates their version numbers to fool you into thinking that their thing is bigger than it really is …
Maybe we hang on to our labels way past their shelf life. We don’t say ‘Distance Education’ all that much because on the web, it’s all distance education. But we still use ‘Flexible Learning’, when it’s all flexible learning – apart from the odd Boot Camp here and there.
And we still talk about ‘Web 2.0’ in a web world richly populated with collaborative, interactive, media-rich, multi-user experiences. Why? Once it might have been appropriate to highlight the unique benefits of a small, new sector of the web experience by giving it a special label. But now, when the unique has become ubiquitous, what’s the point?
Let’s retire Web 2.0 as a label. If it’s not all Web 2.0 now, it soon will be.
A curmudgeon's view of eLearning 