Emerging Technologies in E-Learning - good information, refreshingly amusing

I read and thoroughly enjoyed this essay. It really is cool to have some hard, simple definitions in one place for reference . . . it's the objectivity I appreciate here, that and the good real-life examples offered. I didn't know what a mashup was, Top City Books sounds good, really in my interest arena, but will not come up in any browser and I'm not interested in spending anything beyond a few minutes trying to get in. I'll give it one more shot. Social Computing was a good mini-essay here, but here is where the utopian ideals start to color the essay - "people will be able to A) find great treasuries of information on almost any imaginable topic and B) contribute their knowledge to it". We can already do that. It's called A) a good library, and as for B) contributing to it, let the buyer beware of the information subsequently found. Know your sources! As for institutions abandoning top-down management and employees and partners "becoming part of a living fabric of brand loyalists", that's admirable thinking, but alas, flawed in that it sounds col, antiseptic and corporate in the same way that top-down management in corporations now demands the same thing under pain of termination. Try drinking coke if you work for pepsi - a friend of mine works for one of them and believe me, they don't joke about it. I am all for employee-ownership of their company, with equal participation and success, and everybody wins. Go visit the Cheese Board Collective in Berkeley for a whopping success of a real-life example. Their credo:

We are a collective of about 30 members. Everyone who works at the Cheese Board is a member of the collective with equal decision making power. There is no boss, manager, or non-owner worker. Everyone makes the same hourly wage.

Easily the best cheese and especially bread you can find, and the best service anywhere. If you had to base an electronic social network on a community ideal, this would be the one to do it on.

Mobile learning - "the logical next step for e-learning". I don't think so. A small segment, maybe.

Augmented reality - where you separate the toys from the real deal, i.e. guided surgery.

Smart mobs - Stop, you're killing me. Enough already, let me up! " salvos of text messages" from a "million Filipinos" apparently "toppled President Estrada". Too many sci-fi shoot 'em ups and bad coffee for the quoted Rheingold, I'm afraid. I physically winced when I read this.

MMOGS - the going gets a little sloppy here; "will use" is a tad hasty for me. Kinda, well, kinda goofy if you ask me.

WIKIS - excellent, tight mini-essay that keeps it simple and reminds us it's not authoritative.
information.

One of my deep concerns is addressed with the statement on page 16 - "the challenge will be for learners (all of us) to manage information overload". So true for so long now (decades) and it's getting more so every day. But to state in this paper that "Google and other search engines will evolve to provide tools for people to manage it all" is a royal naieve blunder and insulting to the intelligence; it sounds like a punch line to a Bizarro comic.

I like the glossary and overall, digging for usable nuggets in this article was successful, and some of the idealism made me chuckle.