such as the Google search index. Some of this data was
available in the Web 1.0, however not as well-annotated and
centralized.
This content can be exploited for learning in various ways.
First, learners (and teachers) can use existing resources dur-ing their learning process as information sources (e. g., Wiki-pedia articles as starting points to learn about concepts).
Furthermore, active knowledge construction is supported:
learners can use the data as building blocks for creating new
content (mixing or mash-up of content).
Most of this content is not designed for instruction, but is
real world data, uttered by real people in real contexts. As
such, it is better suited for constructivist approaches than for
Instructional Design with its emphasis on very specically
designed content elements that try to elicit specic instruc-tional outcomes [26]. This is not to say that constructivism
does not value carefully authored content. However, the
content takes a less prominent role.
The abundance of available data has also advantages for
the e-learning researcher. For instance, it is now easier than
ever to build tools that exploit the data to enrich the learn-ing experiences. A vocabulary trainer could automatically
enrich the words to be learned by retrieving pictures from
Flickr or videos from YouTube.