As John Helmer remarked in his blog post after the Learning Technologies show, you would expect there to be more synergy between the publishing community and e-learning than appears to be the case: “for one of these communities, learning is all about books; for the other it isn’t.”1 He went on:
“In the more supply-side driven worlds of online publishing and the Education market, on the other hand, authoritative texts loom larger. Here the game is more about providing access, platforms and discoverability for a body of available information. Content generation is the job of educators and specialist authors; users are presumed to be more active searchers, and to be less spoonfed, less corralled by instructional events than their organisational counterparts. However, forces within each of these markets are driving towards more convergence.”
The e-learning world is still relatively new territory for me, but I have been interested to see how the issues and debates have clear resonances for traditional book publishers. Mixed up in all this are questions of how people learn, how web 2.0 fits, and how do businesses keep making a living while changing radically.
This is certainly topical, since there has been a small buzz of excitement on the e-learning blogs in the last week or so, initially in response to an article in eLearn Magazine.2 Jay Cross responded briefly, noting that learning is a mix of formal and informal, classroom and online, and highlighting how social networking tools are part of that process.3 The day before, Tony Karrer had written more extensively, underlining many of the same issues.4
Personally, I strongly identify with the idea that the boundaries between my playing, working and learning are very fluid, and there are times when I am doing all three simultaneously. This chimes very well with the thinking about informal learning and the ways in which we can harness web 2.0 and, indeed, other digital technologies more generally.
As publishers embrace web 2.0 and social networking more and more, I expect that will help to drive the convergence John Helmer mentioned.
- Helmer, John. “E-learning: across the great divide.” 2 February 2009. The discovery blog. http://blogs.semantico.com/discovery-blog/2009/02/e-learning-across-the-great-divide/
- Carliner, Saul. “Long Live Instructor-Led Learning.” 24 March 2009. eLearn Magazine. http://www.elearnmag.org/subpage.cfm?section=articles&article=76-1
- Cross, Jay. “First, kill all the instructors.” 30 March 2009. Informal Learning Blog. http://www.informl.com/2009/03/30/first-kill-all-the-instructors/
- Karrer, Tony. “Long Live? : eLearning Technology.” 29 March 2009. eLearning Technology blog. http://elearningtech.blogspot.com/2009/03/long-live.html