Good questions and good discussion of this topic Dave and others. I finished my thesis long ago, but my learning did not stop. The new tools make it possible to stay in touch with ideas in a variety of ways. I can see the reason that google, facebook, and others want to create new tools and improve on old tools. Learning to use the new tools seems to me to be intuitive–children do this all the time, but finding the time to play with new tools that have not been fully tested out creates headaches and takes time away from other things busy people must do everyday. As Dave suggests, learning and using new technologies productively takes time, developing and locating content takes time, interacting with students and networks takes time, learning new technologies takes time, and then there is family life….It will be interesting to see if google + is more useful for collaboration than other formats.