Ten Trends 2012: Smart Web

Annually, CORE Education explores ten emerging ICT trends that will impact upon the education landscape for New Zealand and beyond. These are known as CORE Education's Ten Trends. Each month we will post an in-depth article about each trend by a champion from CORE staff.

The increasing amount of technology and services linked and attached to the web is meaning it's evolving a collective form of intelligence; sorted by algorithms sifting through massive amounts of our data and usage patterns, plus making decisions without human involvement. The same space also allows for masses of people to share content, collate works, and interact around general and/or specific areas of interest. Thus it creates an opportunity of a collective knowledge and action. Some ideas and links referenced in the above video for further exploration:

Internet of Things
Iceland created it’s new political constitution through Facebook using the collaborative ideas behind (the wisdom of crowds)
camera brands are building in the functions to share share images and videos through social spaces directly into the hardware
phones identify through geolocation where we are, and where the content we create is as well, then store that data
a growing number of operational services that allow tracking of text books and library resources in schools
commercial kits are already available which allow users to tag and track physical objects using their mobile devices
search engines are starting to understand our viewing habits and serving us specific content related to our history (downside of this is the filter bubble)
an explosion of curation sites such as Tumblr and the latest newcomer, Pinterest, means a deeper opportunity to decipher interest trends
Nike+ Basketball and other technologies allow for deeper analysis of activity