A study conducted by the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth on the Inc 500 (a list of fastest growing companies in US) reveals interesting trends on usage of Social Media. The 148 companies who responded were asked the same detailed questions concerning their usage and measurement of social media that were asked of the Inc. 500 approximately one year and two years earlier. Questions probed the familiarity of respondents with six prominent social media (blogging, podcasting, online video, social networking, message boards and wikis). In order to maintain the integrity of all comparisons, all those tools studied in the first two studies were included in this followup research. In 2009, several new tools were added including the popular microblogging service Twitter and other popular social networking sites like Linkedin, Facebook, and MySpace.

In my last post (Semantic Web Cometh), I mentioned how the underlying principles of the Semantic Web should make it highly inclusive and provide a uniform descriptive language across all sorts of media and technologies and consequently let users spend more time immersed meaningfully in the learning process.

The information age is rapidly turning into an age of information overload. A simple search of the web using a search engine like Google reveals a fantastic array of information. As I’ve discovered given the thousands if not millions of results, trying to sort through and make sense of any of that data is an exercise in futility. This sort of rudimentary search and pray approach isn’t effective, and grows more ineffective by the day with the growing size of the web. Why can’t it be easier? It can – Web 3.0 or the Semantic Web holds that promise.

There’s been quite a bit written about how Twitter can be used for learning. A few interesting reads are listed at the end of this post.

In Learning Circuits’ Big Question for March, most experts agree that social learning is here to stay, differing only in the degree to which it’s used. The workplace culture of an organisation is identified as the biggest challenge in implementing social learning.

Last month, Ron Chapman suggested that eLearning was just a passing fad. This created much furore, and several learning and training experts refuted his claim.