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In principle, Surridge says, scientists should find a transition to Web 2.0 perfectly natural. After all, since the time of Galileo and Newton, scientists have built up their knowledge about the world by “crowdsourcing” the contributions of many researchers and then refining that knowledge through open debate. “Web 2.0 fits so perfectly with the way science works. It’s not whether the transition will happen but how fast,” Surridge says.

Although wikis are gaining, scientists have been strikingly slow to embrace one of the most popular Web 2.0 applications: Web logging, or blogging. “It’s so antithetical to the way scientists are trained,” Duke University geneticist Huntington F. Willard said at the January 2007 North Carolina Science Blogging Conference, one of the first big gatherings devoted to this topic. The whole point of blogging is getting ideas out there quickly, even at the risk of being wrong or incomplete. “But to a scientist, that’s a tough jump to make,” Willard says. “When we publish things, by and large, we’ve gone through a very long process of drafting a paper and getting it peer-reviewed. Every word is carefully chosen, because it’s going to stay there for all time. No one wants to read, ‘Contrary to the result of Willard and his colleagues....’” Nevertheless, Willard favors blogging. As a frequent author of newspaper op-ed pieces, he feels that scientists should make their voices heard in every responsible way. Because most blogs allow outsiders to comment on the individual posts, they have proved to be a good medium for brainstorming and discussions.

“The peer-reviewed paper is the cornerstone of jobs and promotion,” PLoS ONE’s Surridge says. “Scientists don’t blog because they get no credit” for that.

Some universities may be coming around, too. In a landmark vote in February, the faculty at Harvard’s College of Arts and Sciences approved a system in which the college would post finished papers in an online repository, available free to all. Authors would still hold copyright and could still publish the papers in traditional journals.

one new platform feature that still seems really important to deploy given the rising use of SL for education and collaboration, and that is being able to browse the web easily from in-world

We aren’t there yet in terms of the interface for virtual worlds. There is now a small new internal team doing nothing else

keep opening SL up

Virtual worlds, in their broadest form, will be more pervasive that the web, and that means that their systems will need to be open: extended and operated by many people and companies, not just us.

rapid growth in the use of wikis for content presentation

organizations who try to create big eLearning 2.0 Strategies will move much slower than organizations who adopt easy to use tools and make tactical use of these tools

Pressure for Social Learning Solutions in Corporate Learning