E-Learning

I believe that the "IN"thing in the e-learning communities is the P2P technology : Peer-to-peer. When I first heard this word it reminded me of terms like "training of the trainers" so I thought peer to peer would be another educational tool used to train people. However, as I did further readings on this topic, the article by Jennifer Hofmann, Peer-to-Peer: The next hot trend in e-learning (http://www.learningcircuits.org/2002/jan2002/hofmann.html) helped me understand that P2P is not just a tool for training. It is a a technology that would help in sharing resources through a network. This reminded me of a book I had read last semester about the history of the internet. According to that book, the concept of the World Wide Web was based on this theory and purpose of sharing information through a network. I believe that is the underlying concept in P2P as well.

Information share via P2P is becoming very apealing in today's world. First Napster which shared music information and then came a program called Scour which was able to support different kinds of file formats. Just like everything else, P2P has its pros and cons.
Pros
P2P can be used in the business sector as well as in academic sector. In the business sector P2P can be used to train staff or provide much needed online support to a very geographically distributed staff population(including those who work from home as well). In the academic area, P2P is being used to formulate study groups, for example, WebCT. WebCT has become our P2P and we use it as our primary communication and facilitation tool. We receive our lecture notes, post our queries/problems relating to the unit, upload our assignments/presentations and send emails or have conferences(chat). And now we use our team blogs to create the same environment as webct.

Cons
When extracting information which is available to us, we should ask questions about the validation of the information. Is our information encrypted and if so how much of it is encrypted. and so on. Also the issue of desktop security is a question, easy to answer this question but not everyone is informed and are comfortable allowing access to their own desktops.