elearnspace

When we look back, decisions we made/should have made seem obvious. When we look forward, everything is viewed through a lens of conflicting and competing information and ultimately converges on uncertainty. Think back 10-15 years to what now seems very obvious, but at the time may have been a bit loony: the teacher eager to use this thing called the internet for teaching, the librarian wanting to put information online, the person in the office cubicle next to you wanting to register the company’s domain name. Or more recently: Google’s IPO, Apple stock three years ago, the iPod. In retrospect, things look very clear. But for every iPod, iPhone, or Google, there are many Newton’s, Webvan’s, also-ran search engines, and other products. AOL, Compuserve, and Prodigy, after all, sought initially to lock down their service to subscribers. History often provides clear winners and precise insights. When lived forward, life fails to offer such clear demarcations between what we ought to do and what we ought not to do. Hence, uncertainty still exists around SecondLife, Facebook, and to a lessor degree, blogs and wikis. The facebook issue currently rests on suitability for enterprise-wide use. Consider these two posts: Is Facebook in the Enterprise an Oxymoron? and Facebook enterprise application. In a few years, we may see the wise insights of leaders who eagerly pursued the organizational use of Facebook or the educational use of SecondLife. Or we might find that both have slipped into obscurity and are remembered with the same passing indifference or sense of oddity now reserved for Newtons and Webvan.