The Web Is Closed; the Future Is Open
The Web was meant to be Everything. As the Internet as a whole assumes an increasingly commanding role as the technology of global commerce and communication, the World Wide Web from its very inception was designed to be a free and open medium through which human knowledge is created, accessed and exchanged. But, that Web is in danger of coming to a close.
Thus begins An Open Web, a developing resource that is part informational book and part manifesto. Written over five days by a small team in Berlin doing a Book Sprint, An Open Web aims to educate us about what the World Wide Web actually is, how it functions as a composing and knowledge sharing platform, and what we stand to lose as more and more of us abandon it.
If the notion that we are ‘abandoning the web’ sounds strange to you or your students (after all, we’re on the web all the time, aren’t we?), then you will find this short publication very informative. Like the authoring team, pictured above as they celebrate their work projected on a large wall at the end of their sprint, you too might come to cheer for the idea of an open web.
An Open Web is available as a bound book, an HTML document, a PDF (see below), and as an ePub. The authors of An Open Web have made it available under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Check it out — you may be surprised at what you didn’t know about the web.
