E is For eLearning

After reading the first ten pages of the assigned reading, I concluded on two things: Web 2.0 infiltrated mainstream way before I thought it had. Second, the tools available are emerging rapidly and are going to facilitate everything we think that takes years to learn down to months or even weeks.

I visited most site mentioned in the article and that led me to various other sites offering some pretty ingenue tools for education and business. This morning I read an article on the Chronicle about how a group people developed a little snippet that keeps track of all the people that are being lay off. A bigger company bought the license and is marketing to data management companies to tally up the total number of lay off's since last, week, last months, quarter. The snippet was developed into an add-in/plug-in for mail clients which would automatically send the number of lay off notices back to a server.

So, the group of guys who thought of the idea made money, the company who licensed it is making money and the data center that provides information to other sources makes more money. The point is that technology offers these advantages and right now only a few can develop their ideas into reality, but pretty soon you will be able to make movies, effects, music and little snippets by sharing knowledge and interchanging with others.

The reading identified the following points:

• Identify several different emerging technologies.
• Incorporate emerging technologies in teaching and learning activities to engage learners.
• Explain how emerging technologies will affect education, and vice versa.
• Identify the challenges organizations face in adopting emerging technologies.

One technology in particular that I like and can find useful in an educational environment is RSS feed. It basically downloads news or updates on any particular web article, wiki or blog instead of you going to retrieve information; it does it for you. Ethan made a quick presentation, though I did not quite follow much I hope we can go over more in details on Thursday.

There is a section that states "To thrive in an era of social computing, companies must abandon top-down management and communication tactics, weave communities into their
products and services, use employees and partners as marketers, and become part of a living fabric of brand loyalists” (Charron, Favier & Li, 2006, para. 1)."

This is a very socialist approach in a political sense, but has a capitalist outcome. It probably has a better view if it had an educational connotation. In education, it seems that Web 2.0 will facilitate education to all (as long they can afford a computer and Internet access). Third world countries can reach out to a shared knowledge and information that is widely available right now-- if they can search for it wisely. Speaking of searching, the article also mentions how we have this over-reliance on Google and how we must implement better search or "Intelligent Search."

I came across a site with a few tips for better searching. Use wisely and at your own risk!
Web Search allinanchor:, allintext:, allintitle:, allinurl:, cache:, define:, filetype:, id:, inanchor:, info:, intext:, intitle:, inurl:, phonebook:, related:, site:
Image Search allintitle:, allinurl:, filetype:, inurl:, intitle:, site:
Groups allintext:, allintitle:, author:, group:, insubject:, intext:, intitle:
Directory allintext:, allintitle:, allinurl:, ext:, filetype:, intext:, intitle:, inurl:
News allintext:, allintitle:, allinurl:, intext:, intitle:, inurl:, location:, source:
Product Search allintext:, allintitle:

I do not fully understand MOBS.