There’s been no shortage of talk, including in the pages of our magazine, about how Web 2.0 tools are going transform the learning industry.
Many say that collaborative technologies, like wikis, blogs and social networks, will transform learning, thereby ushering in a new era of collaboration and knowledge sharing. Our learning models will no longer be simply top down, but horizontal, as learners share knowledge in peer groups and informal learning networks. !@!
If many of us believe this to be true – that new technology will transform the learning industry – why is it that our use of new tools as learning modalities lags so far behind? Take for example, the most popular of the Web 2.0 collaboration tools, Wikipedia.
A reader recently e-mailed us to point out the paltry wiki entry for chief learning officer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chief_Learning_Officer). If the learning community is on top of the latest trends in technology, why has it failed to fill in a decent entry for the title on the most widely used site for collaboration on the Web? Is there a central disconnect between what we talk about as important and what we actually do?
