Perpetual Beta
Perpetual beta" and the following principle lightweight
models"capture organizational issues related to the software
development that only indirectly in
uence the user. How-ever, they are listed here since they capture parts of what
denes the Web 2.0 and they have an eect on the e-learning
researcher.
In contrast to traditional software, Web 2.0 applications
are no longer released in version-based software packages,
one version at a time, but are constantly rened and im-proved. Changes to services happen gradually, there is no
Google 1.2. This is facilitated by the ability of Web appli-cations to track the user's interaction with the service and thereby gathering data about interaction patterns that is
nearly impossible to collect for desktop applications.
While constant improvement of a service is not a bad
thing, new or changed features may lead to confusion of
learners who are using the service and may lead to dis-tract from the task at hand. Changes in functionality and
user interfaces require adapting previously written manuals.
Sometimes parts of services are stopped completely, as it
happened recently with the fee-based Google Video.
This principle does not endorse a pedagogical theory. How-ever, it has an eect on teachers/researchers that use a spe-cic service. One advantage of the perpetual beta is that
the developers are usually open to suggestions from adap-tors. They often set-up developer discussion boards and use
these to receive additional feedback. In our micro-blogging
use case, we made the experience that the main developers
of the service were strongly open to suggestions and adapted
existing APIs and introduced new ones in response.