The idea of e-learning as interactive rather than ‘page turning’ began from the early 1990s. My book E-moderating explains the five-stage approach and the new roles of the online teacher. E-tivities explains how to design for active and interactive learning. Both books tell the story of the development of learning and teaching with text-based asynchronous forums or bulletin boards. Synchronous text-based forums are still highly accessible and good to deploy for low-cost, high-value learning activities. Text and dialogue continue to be the primary ways of creating learning with others but there are many more technologies now.

We have a plethora of new choices. The advent of social media and the contributing web has hugely raised the awareness of technology as offering new forms of promoting interaction and participation. Many of the examples I suggest here have been used for news, marketing campaigns or individual notifications to the world, but here I note how they have been used for e-activities and learning groups. To make an informed choice among them, one needs to understand the technology's characteristics. One good way of thinking about the wide variety of options is considering them all as environments for learning, offering different opportunities and tending to make easier or promote certain kinds of group behavior.

One also needs to think about how to combine the use of different technological opportunities—what is usually called blended learning.