I've been at the LT Conference for the last two days; I was involved in a couple of sessions and I spoke to lots of people both in the Conference and Exhibition.
What I was amazed about was the very wide spectrum of understanding and use of the tools and technologies for learning. There seemed to still be many for whom this was a completely untried experience, whilst others who had already used LMS and authoring tools were striving to do things better - more effectively, more efficiently and so forth - and of course there were many who were trying to come to terms with what social learning had to offer them.
But I came away with a number of concerns. It wasn't so much the fact that there are now so many different definitions and expectations of what the term "e-learning" actually means, nor the fact that the Exhibition was dominated largely by providers of what I would call "first generation e-learning systems" which for me didn't reflect the full picture of learning technologies today, but more that as a result, delegates are receiving mixed (and therefore confusing) messages, from different quarters, as to how to implement tecnology-supported learning approaches.
For instance, I was talking to someone who was at the Exhbition to find out how to start the whole ball rolling and move from traditional classroom-based training to "e-learning", I remarked how I thought they were actually in a very good position. They could learn from the lessons of the last decade and in fact go straight into providing social approaches to learning; the technology was now there to support it, and it was very cost-effective. But the response was interesting to say the least:
"Really! X told me that I need to get all my content online first, then I need to think about a web conferencing system, and then when I've got all that sorted, at that point I should think about social media ... They reckon it'll be at least 4 or 5 years before I need to think about social media."
When I relayed this to my Internet Time Alliance colleagues, Jay Cross instantly sprang into action and put together this great blog posting that summarises the ITA's position on this. In a nutshell; it's not about incremental steps that you have to go through, but leap-frogging to end-state. Here's one of the diagrams he uses to visualise this - but do read the posting in full.
