Well..Jakob Nielsen has some interesting remarks in regards to Web 2.0 AJAX implementations. See below an excerpt from an article on an interview Matt Mickiewicz did with him from Sitepoint.com.
"What do you think of the current implementations of AJAX (Google Maps, Writely, Google Suggest, Zimbra, etc.) on the Web today?
They are irrelevant for the vast majority of business web sites. (And by "business web site" I also mean sites for government agencies and non-profits.)
A business site will profit much more from writing better headlines than from sticking a programming trick on its pages. Take maps: yes, it's one of the usability guidelines for store finders and locators to show a map of your location. But don't make this a highly interactive map -- it's better to use a hand-drawn map that's optimized to giving directions to your address. One that shows landmarks, recommended parking lots, and bus stops, and emphasizes freeways, but excludes the small side streets that people probably wouldn't use when driving to your building.
Similarly, when we tested a large number of investor relations sites, we found that advanced tools for plotting stock trends and financial numbers only confused most individual investors. A better alternative is to show the most important information in a static plot that's been optimized by a good designer. (Yes, institutional investors in our test did use advanced visualization tools, but they did so on their Bloomberg terminals. On a company's own IR site, they were looking for the CEO's vision for the company's direction.)
Admittedly, Google Suggest is a neat hack. I think similar ideas would be useful on extranets when users are filling out form fields restricted to a few thousand possible entries, such as product names or destination addresses for a shipment. Type-ahead could save a lot of keystrokes on sites that are used repeatedly."
I would agree with him and believe that you could say the kind of the same thing in regards to the use of Web 2.0 technology in e-Learning, especially in a corporate training context - I say that with a caveat in that it all depend how its going to be used.
Mashup technologies are fun and really neat tools--but think, is a corporation really going to want some or parts of their proprietary content out for everyone to use -- I don't think so, unless maybe their selling it, even then, they cannot give away the store.
I always like Jakob Nielsen because he is down in the grass with the users and he calls it like he sees it. I think the pundits are way too ahead of themselves about the impact of Web 2.0 translated to e-Learning 2.0.....Again, its all fun stuff -- but are businesses really incorporating this into their online corporate training.....No, they are not. I can tell you confidently our customers are not. It would be neat if we were there, but we're not.
See one of my previous posts from by other blog, Boggs e-Learning Chronicle:
Saying Its So, Does Not Make it So...Even in e-Learning
Dave Boggs
SyberWorks