(This is Martin Weller – I’m going to be taking over some of the blogging role from Laura as she has moved to a new position of Global Ruler of Supreme Power).

So I finally got my Google Wave invite and enthusiastically went in to play. The aim of Wave is to provide a collaboration environment. Users create ‘waves’, which you add other users to. You can edit posts and there is a neat ‘playback’ function so you can see how a wave has unfolded over time. You can of course add all sorts of cool widgets, such as maps, to messages and edit other people’s so what you have is a sequence of collaboration unfolding over time.

But the overwhelming feeling I had, and most of those I waved with, (may as well get used to that as a new verb) was a sense of ‘now what?’. This is partly because the interface is, surprisingly for Google, unintuitive – for instance, to edit a message you need to click on the little arrow in the top corner of a message. But I think it is largely because Wave is a solution to a problem we’re not sure we have yet. It is a tentative technology. Despite all the hype, I’m not sure Google even know how people will use it. It’s a ‘put it out there and see what happens’ approach. It’s not that Wave is a disappointment or failure, it’s more that it will require time to grow. I expect someone will suggest we try brainstorming a research bid in Wave, or conducting a global debate, and we’ll find that it really is a useful tool.

This raises a couple of issues in relation to SocialLearn for me: firstly it demonstrates that if you have clout and presence like Google you can afford to launch something that takes time to establish itself. Had Wave been launched by a small start-up we wouldn’t have been clammering for invites and the time it will take to establish itself may not have been granted. The same might well be true for SocialLearn, and indeed any learning focused applications. They are not like Flickr where it is an easy, and obvious, sell. They take time and people to demonstrate their advantage – to illustrate they are a solution to a problem you didn’t know you had.

The second point is that tools like Wave begin to look awfully close to VLEs, and HEIs simply cannot compete with this level of technological innovation. It is pointless to try and create a Wave like tool for learning – Wave is that tool. So educational technologists and HEIs need to concentrate on what they are best at – applying such tools in an educational context. This, I think, strengthens the hand of the loosely-coupled approach where different tools are knitted together to create a learning environment, rather than one centralised system.