Education's Fear of Web 2.0?

Thought provoking article from Read/Write Web about the fear of Web 2.0 in business which links nicely to my last blog post about VLEs and 'tweakability'. It links to a research report produced by Forrester Research on 'Web 2.0 Social Computing Dresses Up For Business' and this is a useful summary of its content. There's a definite fear of letting go in a business context, but I'd also say it exists in education too. The thought of allowing people to mess about in order to explore the environment to find what works for them, rather than what the institution wants them to do means that things are unnecessarily limited and may be perceived as not being attractive for student use. Anyway... here's the link to the article and a snippet of what it contains...

Fear of Web 2.0: "Enterprises continue to adopt web technologies and 'web 2.0' trends, but there are two common threads to this adoption. One is that web technologies are step-by-step being adopted by enterprises, but they aren't yet ready to usurp many desktop software apps. The Google Apps vs Microsoft Office debate currently raging is proof of that. The second thread is that enterprises have a fear of web 2.0 tools being mis-used by their employees."