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Thursday, June 22, 2006

Are We Approaching Collaborative eLearning Wrong? - The Individual is the New Group

I ran across a recent article by Stowe Boyd - Matthew Glotzbach on Consumer Collaboration that is an interesting look at how the workforce is changing and it has some implications for learning professionals. But, he also linked to a great post: The Individual is the New Group - where he points out that the classic notion of groupware has been falling out of favor and instead the concept of soloware with extension for collaboration (think blog vs. discussion group) is gaining adoption.

A lot of his rationale for the shift echos what I've been reading from Andrew McAfee around Enterprise 2.0 and particularly the failure of software that enforces too many restrictions. Instead, "emergence" - the ability of the system to be fairly open and allow patterns to emerge.

My recent post around Collaborative Online Assignments and my experience with Collaborative Learning Using Web 2.0 Tools - A Summary makes me wonder if maybe we aren't being too groupware/Enterprise IT oriented (too restrictive) and not soloware/emergent oriented?

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