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Almost half of all content consumers surveyed by Technorati trust traditional media sources less than they did five years ago

Equally interesting is the fact that almost 50% of content consumers surveyed by Technorati trust the content that they’re finding on blogs—a number that rivals the 60% of content consumers who trust the content they find in print newspapers, television broadcasts and radio programming.

60% of all bloggers surveyed spend between 1 and 3 hours per week working on their blogs—and the average blogger posts new content to their site 2-3 times per week.

there have been four fundamental changes in information technology since humans learned to speak.

Somewhere, around 4000 BC, humans learned to write.

codex replaced the scroll sometime soon after the beginning of the Christian era.

Some educators have come to the conclusion that China’s outstanding academic success, as indicated by test scores, may be what is holding it back. Now, China is searching for better education models elsewhere. Although the government does not publicly endorse American education as the model, the public seems eager to embrace what is viewed as a more liberal and creative system—ironically, at a time when many in the United States are gazing enviously at the discipline and order of the Chinese system, and the No Child Left Behind Act has brought a new focus on testing.

For thousands of years, dynasties of emperors (with a few exceptions) followed the Confucian tradition of conformity, hierarchy, and respect for authority, and the Communist government continued this tradition by seeking to maintain control over all aspects of life. The result has been a highly disciplined but docile workforce. Fostering creativity suggests freedom, and though that prospect can be glimpsed in education reforms, the reality may still lie someway off.

My suspicion is that they know far more about this than we adults.

Never have the young shared so much, so often in so many different ways.

Teaching and lecturing are largely lone wolf activities in classrooms. Schools, colleges and Universities share little. Educational professionals are deeply suspicious of anything produced outside of their classroom or their institution.

The new “wiki revolutions” are so explosive and happen so fast, that there is no clear vanguard to take power, leaving a vacuum. The vacuums that result pose significant challenges for everyone who cares about moving from oppression, dictatorship and fundamentalism to openness, democracy and 21st century governments.

he world is increasingly complex and interconnected, and, at the same time, experiencing an erosion of common values and principles. This undermines the public’s trust in leadership, which in turn threatens economic growth and political stability.  In the words of the WEF’s founder Klaus Schwab, we need to “concentrate on defining the new reality and discuss which shared norms are required for making global cooperation possible in this new age.”

There are traditional risks like nuclear war, terrorism, climate change, infectious diseases, economic crisis and failed states.  But new risks are emerging everywhere. Consider something as seemingly mundane as the global supply chain. The vast networks that provide the world with food, clothing, fuel and other necessities could handle an Iceland volcano and one other catastrophe like the failure of the Panama Canal. But according to experts, a third simultaneous disaster would collapse the system. People around the world would stop getting food and water, leading to unthinkable social unrest and even a disintegration of civilized society.

What about Web 3.0? So, that’s a very brief description of the shift to Web 2.0, but what about Web 3.0? Does there have to be one? Is it already here? I’ve heard quite a few people speculating about Web 3.0. At one point, when virtual worlds such as Second Life were all the rage, it was being described as Web 3.D and many were predicting that the web would become a 3 dimensional space that we would fly around using our virtual avatars. Others have described Web 3.0 as the ‘semantic web’. The development of semantic web standards was designed to help computers ‘understand’ and read web pages and make connections between them. This would dramatically improve the effectiveness of search engines and help people to access web based information more effectively. One of the most recent predictions is that with the drastic growth of internet able hand-held devices such as phones, gaming consoles and tablet devices Web 3.0 will be all about ‘the mobile web’.

Augmented reality is a kind of fusion between our existing physical reality and the internet.

What it means in reality is that mobile devices, will help us to access information from the internet which is specific to our physical location and proximity to real world objects places and even people. Check out mobile apps from Gowalla and Foursquare for examples of this.