eLearning 2.0 - An Immediate, Important Shift

I just finished reading a blog post on Read/Write Web - eLearning 2.0 - All You Need to Know. Normally, I find the content on R/WW to be pretty good, but this time, it left me a bit flat.

I'm a big believer in eLearning 2.0 and it's interesting to R/WW's take on eLearning 2.0. But the title - "everything you need to know" was a particularly bad choice of words. As you read through the post, you really don't get any sense for what eLearning 2.0 is all about. They talk about things like Nuuvo (more or less an LMS), Google Apps (online applications) as examples of eLearning 2.0 applications. Without some explanation of how they might be used in an eLearning 2.0 way this probably hurts more than helps.

What might be more valuable to the readers of R/WW is to focus on the fairly fundamental shift represented by eLearning 2.0 which is very similar to the shift represented by Web 2.0. After that shift is better explained, then look at how different tools and systems might support people who are making the shift (learners) or people who are responsible for helping others make the shift (corporate training / educators). At the end of the day, eLearning 2.0 is much more than would be indicated by reading about the applications listed in this post.

But what really got to me about reading the post by R/WW was that it was easy to read it and come away with a belief that eLearning 2.0 is all about adoption of these applications. Which to many people equates to "it's about them."

And that's a problem. The most important thing to understand about eLearning 2.0 is that it is an immediately applicable and important shift in learning that applies right here and right now for most knowledge workers. Adopting a practice like blogging as a personal learning and networking tool or adopting Personal and Group Learning Using Web 2.0 Tools as a means to support collaborative work teams is something that is an immediate and important shift for knowledge workers - and that's you!

The bottom line is that eLearning 2.0 is not about a bunch of applications, it's about adopting practices that leverage these applications to support work and learning in new, powerful ways.