I was recently reading a wrap-up post on eLearningTech, which pointed me to an older post that Tony Karrer had written. In this post Tony writes about the key aspects of Learning 2.0 (briefly summarized here):

• Start Tactical and Bottom Up


• Avoid the Culture Question


• Avoid Highly Regulated Content (and Lawyers)


• Learning Professionals Must Lead


• Prepare Workers for Learning 2.0


• Technology is Tactical not Strategic


• Avoid the CIO

What's interesting about this is that this is the way that I've started building out the Instructional Design network of students and alumni (and other people involved with the Graduate Program at UMass Boston), first with Ning, then adding on a Wiki and other services that can help both students and alumni.

What I find interesting is that all the members of the community are learning professionals, or want to be learning professionals anyway, but we are still experiencing the same types of issues that any organization faces: it's a real culture change to try to get people involved and to actively contribute (some) content to any outlet of our learning community - be it a link that they share with us on delicious, a blog post on Ning, an event on the Ning calendar, a comment or discussion post, or a wiki article.

This sort of reminds me of the "I'm not good at computers" post that I had last week. Yes people do experience log-on fatigue when they have to use multiple services such as different types of social networks, different types of wikis, different types of bookmark sharing services, and a whole slew of other Web 2.0 services.

However, did most of us complain when we had to pick up four or five separate history books in that HIST205 course that helped us with our major? Do we often complain that we can't find all the resources we need in one book and we have to (gasp) use two or three other references? Maybe I am being too harsh, I don't mean to be, ( :-) ) but if we as educators don't take the reigns, who will? This is not a rhetoric question :-)