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My first impression of Richardson's Read/Write Web chapter was that he cited the right sources. He started in 1989 with Tim Berners-Lee, as described in Andy Carvin's synopsis of his speech on the Semantic Web at the MIT Tech Review Emerging Technologies Conference in September 2004. The link from the third edition of the book to the source article is already broken, but I found it posted on Carvin's site at Tim Berners-Lee: Weaving a Semantic Web. Carvin describes the talk Berners-Lee gave at MIT that month, including the following:

Berners-Lee’s early remarks focused on his development of the Web. “Making the Web was really simple because there was already this morass of things being developed on the Internet,” including protocols such as TCP/IP and other standards. “All I had to do on top of that to create the Web was to create a single global space, which some people said was rather arrogant…. HTTP was a new scheme for the Web… and the idea was that it would minimally constraining.” And HTML, the language he created to drive the Web, would be “the cloth on which a tapestry would be made – the jewels, the colors…”

Based on this fast-growing morass of websites and the interactions between them, what’s come out of it? Dot-com companies that have come and gone, new ways of thinking – and more recently, wikis and blogs. “The original thing I wanted to do was make it a collaborative medium, a place where we can all meet and read and write…. Collaborative things are exciting, and the fact people are doing wikis and blogs shows they’re [embracing] its creative side.”

Carvin continued to write up Berners-Lee's "90-minutes-worth in 30 minutes" talk, concluding with his comments about the Web and education (remember, this is Sept. 2004):

As a final question, Metcalfe asked Berners-Lee about his thoughts on the Web as an educational tool. “I’d like to see lots of curricula like the MIT Open Courseware initiative being picked up by K-12,” he said. “The tricky thing is that when you try to put down things like encyclopedia articles, like Wikipedia (which he earlier referred to as “The Font of All Knowledge”) . You really need to keep education materials sown together. So I’d love to see a student be able to fly through this courseware, maybe in 3-D, following his or her interests. I know it takes a huge amount of efforts to keep these things up to date, but I’d [even] like to see teachers help contribute to it.”

“Students can work together [on the Web] when they can interact with simulations, with teachers, but particularly with each other,” he concluded. “And for that we need lots of tools, lots of standards, lots of technology… There’s lots of work to do out there.”

This put me in mind of Randy Paush's work at Carnegie-Mellon with Alice -- and, of course, our work in our current class together.