Back to the Future at #ET4online

Thanks again to the fine folks at Sloan C Emerging Technologies for Online Learning Symposium for inviting me to kick off the conference in San Jose this morning as the opening keynote speaker. Several people have asked for a copy of the slide deck; I have uploaded a PDF version of the slides here.  Download SLOAN C EMERGING TECH 2010 WAGNER I know that the Sloan team streamed the speech and that it will be archived later on during the conference. I believe you can find information on the archived presentation here.

Regarding the presentation....

Yes, it's true. I DID play the first opening bars of "Do You Know the Way to San Jose" and ask people if they knew the words that followed. I wanted to be sure that as long as we were all here together in San Jose that we could ALL enjoy that particular little earworm together as part of our conference experience. 

For the uninitiated....An "earworm" is a song that you can't get out of your mind.

Are you humming it yet?

And yes it is also true that I made gentle fun over the fact that - newsflash - the fine folks at Cal-Berkeley have recently discovered that there might just be something to this online learning thing. I brought my copy of last week's SF Chronicle - yes, the kind that folds up and gets newsprint on your fingers - to share that exciting news with the attendees. And yes, I am being more than a little facetious. Seriously, you Golden Bears...it's 2010. Cat's been out of the bag for, oh, I don't know....maybe 25 years or so. Seriously.

I even brought along a stack of my (paper) analyst reports from 1999 as empirical evidence to suggest that we've already been down this path a time or two.

And yes, it's also true that I poked at just about all of us in the room to mind some of the gaps that will eventually divide and conquer our collective efforts to make the world a better place for teaching and learning with technology, IF we can't get over our bad selves.   Research vs practice, academic vs corporate, innovation vs. implementation, products vs solutions, traditional elearning people vs emerging elearning people...

C'mon folks. If WE can't figure out how each of us can play our important parts in providing our stakeholders with eQuality experiences, then it calls the question - are we as good at online learning as we want to believe ourselves to be?

Gonna be a great few days. If you know the way to San Jose, c'mon over and join the fun.

Comments

[Jeremy Kemp]

Thanks for the San Jose State shoutout - we are the shoemaker's children.