Hot Trends in E-learning:
Is peer-to-peer the next hot trend in e-learning? Uh…no.
The article (from Learning Circuits, a great online e-learning magazine from the American Society for Training and Development), and it answers it’s own question with this comment: “If all of the resources (data) are located on a few centralized servers, then implementing P2P on an enterprise level might not make sense.”
For better or worse, education is centralized. The data (knowledge) is stored in a few centralized locations, usually textbooks or professor’s noggins. Before peer-to-peer will take hold in education (or any highly structured organization, for that matter), I think the organization will need to start to decentralize first (a la Tom Peters).
Peer-to-peer isn’t the agent of change for this; peer-to-peer is the tool to make that change effective once it has begun.