(Captcha in FLOSSE Posse is refusing to believe I'm human, so I'll post my comment here. It's about time to write something here anyway.)
Reflectin on the development of e-learning in Finland Teemu argues that "in Finland we never got e-learing 1.0, but rather have done e-learning 2.0 already from the early 1990’s". He continues:
"[t]he best practices which also got (and get) most publicity in the Finnish discussion were (and are), most of the time, cases of integrating home pages, newsgroups, IRC, as well as free and open online learning content in a pedagogically firm way. Already in the early 1990’s the best cases were mashups of different Internet tools put together to server learning. Of course it was clumsier than with the current “Web 2.0 tools”. To get announcements of new things you needed some human effort as there were no RSS, and to write your essay online with your friend would require skills of sharing files when you can today use Ajax-based collaborative writing tools. It was more complicate and slower but still possible."
"Even in the cases of using LMSs in Finland, there has never been (even implicit) believe that when you build you (standard-based) and packaged course on LMS it will then “teach” your students as such and this way you can have more students on your courses. Ridiculous! In the use of LMSs teachers have always looked for features that are supporting their pedagogical practices. For instance, at the University of Helsinki they have always used web-based computers-supported collaborative work environment, rather than any LMS. Students are subjects, not objects."
It may very well be that the Finnish education system never really represented the e-learning 1.0 in it's purest form. For example, structured learning objects never took hold, and although the LMEs are by far the most used tools, their status has perhaps not been quite as dominant as in some countries.
But I really don't agree that we've been practicing e-learning 2.0 either. Although collaborative, participatory, student oriented etc. learning has been possible with the tools we had previously, it just hasn't been feasible. Teachers don't need to think their students as objects to treat them us such, if the technology makes other approaches too difficult or cumbersome.
In a sense I agree with Teemu that web 2.0 is in essence really a reneissance of the participatory aspects of the web. This is what Paul Graham is also saying. But it doesn't really render the concept of web 2.0 meaningless. I believe thre really is a paradigm shift going on, based on the burst of the dotcom bubble and the rethinking of the approach to web services - including the ones we use to teach and learn.
I'm really looking forward for the discussions tomorrow.