E-volution
The world celebrated the 200th birth anniversary of Charles Robert Darwin on February 12, 2009. As the Nature News puts it, ‘no single researcher has since matched his collective impact on the natural and social sciences; on politics, religions, and philosophy; on art and cultural relations’. In his theory of evolution one gets the depth of his broad horizon, comprehensive thinking.
In remembrance, it may be interesting to note, a couple of potential evolutionary changes taking place in the e-learnscape in our modern times.
The dictionary definition of the word evolution is stated as, the process of working out or developing – a process of gradual change of state. Seen in the context of e-learnscape 3Cs of Content, Connectivity & Collaboration, there are transformational changes taking place which can well be distinctive and evolutionary. By no means meant to be exhaustive, here is a list of examples.
One laptop per child: The vision to transform the lives of children led to the foundation of One Laptop per Child (OLPC) mission in 2005 and the creation of the XO open source laptop.
By providing a very inexpensive, rugged and powerful, connected laptop to every school-age child with little or no access to education, the mission of OLPC is to provide a window for learning, exploration and self-expression. The OLPC, in tie up with computer manufacturer, software provider, academics and other implementation bodies has been trying to empower the lives of nearly two billion children and their families of the developing world.
The five operative principles of OLPC are:
- Child ownership – designed explicitly for children of the elementary classes, the ownership of the XO laptop is a basic right of the child.
- Low ages – the XO is designed for the use of children of ages 6 to 12 in covering the years of elementary school. But nothing precludes its use earlier or later in life.
- Saturation – digital saturation in a given population to facilitate different communities to grow together in a connective way.
- Connection – ubiquitous connectivity in the OLPC network to ensures a dialogue among generations, nations and cultures.
- Free and open source – a free and open framework that supports and encourages the intellectual growth of the children by learning and teaching one another through interface and a culture of sharing.
OLPC is a major stride for change in the ICT world for development. The scope of the initiative has a global footprint as it spans across the continents, countries and various language complexities. It aims to empower children and families for a better future through education, access to information and inter-connective sharing.
Wikipedia: Launched in 2001, Wikipedia the free online encyclopedia, by now has 12 million general reference work articles collaboratively scripted by volunteers across the world. Here, the articles can be contributed, edited and added upon freely in a perpetual work-in-progress manner.
In 2006, the Time magazine in choosing the millions of anonymous contributors of user-generated content as Person of the Year, personified simply as You, cited Wikipedia as one of three examples of Web 2.0 services.
Since then, the concept of user generated content and collaboration has seen many progressions. The OER (Open Educational Resource) for example typifies the open courseware movement, where in learning content, tools and implementation resources as open educational materials are freely collaborated.
Scitable by Nature Education is a collaborative learning hub for Science. Currently on genetics, here one can read articles, connect with global faculties/students and contribute to the repository.
Web 2.0 and beyond: The CERN labs introduced the World Wide Web in 1991. The second generation of Web 2.0 became notable from 2004.
As internet developed over the years, Web 2.0 tools like wikis, blogs, social networking, podcasting, RSS feeds, tagging led to the evolution of web based services and communities. The emergence of Web 2.0 brought in a new melting pot of transformational changes to significantly impact our business, social and work lives.
The Web 2.0 known as the platform for inter connective social web culture now been worked upon to usher in the new generation of semantic web. The web evolution so far, from harnessing and distributing information in 1.0 to social networking and inter connectivity in 2.0, will have with 2.0 newer version / 3.0, the collective intelligence as the added layer. The new challenge is to find ways of artificial intelligence to add a layer of meaning on the existing web to make it less of a catalogue and more of a reason led guide. Without getting into the debate of versioning, the process of evolution continues unabated in the web world, and as it seems life beyond web 2.0 in its current state, is a distinct possibility.
The epochal remark ‘the survival of the fittest’ is still valid in our times. Let’s see how many of the current trends / changes can last the test of time to be truly evolutionary. 
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