BRIGHTON, UK, May 25, 2006 – Mark Harrison, partner with Kineo, has led Kineo’s research into future trends for e-learning. He recently presented his predictions at an E-Learning Network event in London – now available for viewing at the Kineo website. He asked his audience to focus six years down the road, to the time the Olympics will take place in the same city. What will e-learning mean by then? He reached some interesting conclusions.
First, there will (hopefully) be no such thing as e-learning in 2012. Harrison asked his audience: “How many hours do you spend at your computer in a day? More than eight? Do you call it e-working? Or e-report writing? Of course not. So why use the term e-learning? We need to move away from viewing e-learning, or even learning, as a discrete task, and see it as what it is – something that we just do on a day-to-day basis without differentiating it from the rest of our activities.” So while e-learning will of course still take place, we should not be calling it anything at all – not even informal learning.
Harrison went on to identify the key driver for learning to permeate through the workspace: new technologies. In that respect, he suggested, the future is already here: “If you look back six years, to 2000, nearly all the emerging technologies that we cite as examples of informal learning – blogs, wikis, podcasting, were already here. We just hadn’t figured out their value, or given them a name yet.” He concluded that ensuring e-learning has a successful future means focusing on sustainable technologies. “Some of them won’t make it. Remember the laser disc? I personally don’t believe wikis and blogs will survive”. E-learning heresy? Time will tell….
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