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As Graham Attwel points out in this post (Adopting and implementing educational social software), the gap between educational systems and social software seems to be hard to bridge. “The most important step is sharing knowledge and expertise - for the educational researchers to be aware of the potentials of the software applications and for the programmers to understand the needs of users and learners. That is still not happening.” Sharing requires possesing the knowledge and understanding the opportunities that social software harbour.

Maybe the report “Transforming Your Intranet” by Bill Ives and Kathleen Gilroy could be a contribution to this mutual body of knowledge. The report, published by Melcrum Publishing, gives a look at the opportunities for using a number of the web 2,0 tools inside the enterprise including blogs, wikis, mashups, tagging, RSS, and new learning platforms. These possibilities of combining technology (2.0) with the existing intranet of institutions are the main topic and might give educational researchers a head start on bridging the gap between education and technology. The report also includes an interesting and informative article by Euan Semple on Using Social Computing Tools on the Intranet.