Beyond learning management systems in life long learning

During the last years Internet has been changing the way people work as well as the way people work is changing the Internet. New communication paradigm, new tools, and new technology have grown-up driven by the users. The network is moving fast in the direction of a social network where people collaborate by sharing their knowledge and experience, their thoughts, their materials, their documents, their pictures and videos, their presentations, etc.. The leaders of this revolution are the basic concepts underlying the semantic web in which content plays the key role. Distributed and shared bookmarking systems, forum, wiki, blog, and push technologies such as feed are used rather then search engines so that browsing and searching are not any more the main activities that users perform on the web. In this new networked social working environment learning management systems too must be able to adapt their functionality and standards to the emerging ones. The learning process could strongly benefit of going outside of traditional learning environments and teaching materials must be considered in the terms of semantic web content. This is to be considered the road-map to the development of novel learning services in the actual social network scenario.