By Eva Kaplan-Leiserson
What
does technology have in store for learning in the year ahead? This article interviews experts in Web 2.0, mobile learning, and games and simulations about
top trends and their forecasts for the near future of e-learning. Following is a summary.
Web 2.0
- The things with the biggest increases are blogs, podcasts, communities of practice, and wikis.
- Huge amount of growth in virtual worlds such as Second Life. The real benefit is the ability to have a sense of presence. In a virtual world, you can see who is talking, and that’s just really powerful.
- Training, formal learning…will still be used for broad audiences with common needs. e-Learning 2.0 is all about more narrow needs where you can’t possibly go into the publish model.
Mobile Learning
- Some courses and training happening in mobile learning, but ... performance support as probably the biggest push.
- It’s probably going to catch on when people realize they shouldn’t just do mobile learning, they should design their learning so it can be mobilized too. That way you don’t really have to build mobile learning so much as you have to build good universal design. As you make that transition easy for people—to build it once and deliver it [in] many different formats—that’s going make it prolific.
Simulations and Games
- Expect to see mobile phones used as platform for simulations and games and, later, as client for virtual worlds.
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