Over at The eLearning Guild Research blog, Steve Wexler has been sharing some of the research we've been looking at to prepare the Guild's e-Learning 2.0 report, due out in late September. I've had a chance to see all of it because I'm co-authoring an essay that will be included in the report and there's some very interesting stuff there. These are some nuggets that Steve's shared so far that are worth a closer look:

• Many people cannot access social networking sites at work--an even bigger problem at large organizations .Not surprisingly, the sites that tend to be blocked are YouTube and social networks like Facebook and MySpace. But when you consider the experiences of companies like Serena, you have to wonder what these organizations are thinking. I suspect that they're worried that people will be wasting time at work, but I can do that without YouTube or Facebook. Is anyone blocking Solitaire or the many pointless conversations that are held in cubicles everywhere?

• Some interesting differences between Millenials and 30+ workers in terms of using social media. Blogs, wikis, social bookmarking and RSS are definitely bigger sellers with the younger crew, than with those over 30. Interestingly, though, these are the more "passive" activities of Web 2.0. People are READING blogs and wikis pretty regularly, but they arent commenting on or editing them. We still have a way to go with the interactive aspects of social media, which to my mind are the primary reasons for using these tools for learning.

• Some different ideas on how e-Learning 2.0 is entering organizations. There's some debate among the team members about whether training professionals are driving the change or if social media has already entered the building in a big way and training professionals just don't realize it. The cynical side of me thinks it's probably the latter. My experience in organizations has been that often the training folks are the last people to know what's going on in terms of how people are doing their work unless there's a specific need to deliver a training event. I could be wrong, though, as the majority of e-Learning professionals who responded to the Guild survey indicated that they thought they'd be driving the e-Learning 2.0 train.