Instructional Design for the Semantic Web

Well, its been a while.

Here's whats really turning me on these days....the possibilities of applying the principles of the semantic web to learning. I've been inspired once again by a Kevin Kelly video talking about the next 5000 days of the web. What I really liked is his analogy of the web as a single system. His vision, and one that I believe we're already seeing is an all encompassing web with peripheral devices acting as windows to that web. More an more, computers and other peripherals are used less as single processing units and more as windows to and through the web.

What this means for learning, is the ability to create the necessary semantics around learning so that learning content is appropriately marked up for our devices to find, retrieve and deliver in a consistent and useful manner. The creation of a meta-language for learning is no easy task, nor is it conceivable that there would be a single language created (at least not right now). But the importance of feeding the web, exposing content to the web is critical for learning.

When my wife was pregnant the quickest wa to learn what needed to be done was research the web. This is the reality of our times, that learning happens real time. Enabling learning comntent to be pulled at real time is consistent with tech trends and also consistent with good instructional design practice. As an instructional designer I am excited about the opportunity to contribute to the advancement of our field through its application to THE new learning environment web 3.0. For anybody who isn't getting what I'm saying, I will be speaking at Brandon Hall's Innovation in Learning conference on this very topic.

I am also in the process of working on a book that underlies the process for applying instructional design to the creation of 'semantics'. Hopefully one day it will actually get done.

Later,
RT