Editorial

Editorial for a special edition of the Journal of e-Learning and Knowledge Society is dedicated to the theme of Computer-mediated Communication (CMC) in the context of language learning. This is the first of two special editions of the Journal that is publishing papers from the joint EUROCALL CMC and Teacher Education Special Interest Groups’ Workshop held at CILTA, University of Bologna in March 2012. The theme chosen for the Workshop was “Learning through Sharing: open resources, open practices, open communication” because of the ever-increasing interest on the part of practitioners not only in foreign language teaching (FLT) but in education in general in ‘all things open’. Over nearly the past two decades, outside of education, the concepts of ‘open’ and ‘knowledge sharing’ have achieved great success through movements such as the open source movement and projects such as Wikipedia. During the same time period the Web has changed and is now characterized by what is commonly called “Web 2.0”. This term refers to the shift from expert- enerated content published on the Web to user-generated content shared and published on the Web through blogs, wikis and social networking sites. What brings these movements and projects together is the concept of “the wisdom of the crowds” (Surowiecki, 2004) by which the aggregation and sharing of knowledge benefits the collective whole, the Web being the medium through which this takes place.