20 "eLearnings" From Two Months on the Road(trip)

Been a busy couple of months of elearning road-trips. From EDUCAUSE to Online EDUCA, from WCET to WICHE, from DevLearn to AECT (with a little bit of virtual Sloan-C tossed in for good measure). Literally thousands of plenaries, presentations, and poster sessions from which to choose, along with hundreds of vendor stands and trade show booths. Here are some of my big take-aways:

• Hooray and congratulations! This distance/online/elearning thing we do has tipped into mainstream consciousness. Let's give a cheer for the researchers, the teachers, the authors, the artists, the technologists, the producers, the analysts and the evaluators who have made this happen. We rock.
• We matter enough that governments want to regulate us. Congressmembers rail against us. No more flying under the radar.
• Analytics are hot, hot, hot. Learning analytics, content analytics, web analytics, engagement analytics, to name a few.
• Speaking of analytics...mathematically speaking, a learning outcome is pretty much the same as a point of sale. (Thank you, Phil Ice.)
• Second Life is dead, dead, dead. Sorry.
• Mobile is the future.  Smartphones and tablets and readers, oh, my.
• Game based learning has a long way to go before people take it seriously.
• High quality video conferencing is making a comeback.
• We may get inspired by big ideas, but we are moved to action by fear, uncertainty and dread.
• On the commercial front...Pearson intends to own our universe. Adobe has pretty much given up on us. Just about everybody wants to sell us an "analytics solution". Or a mobile app.
• People really need to quit thinking that "open" is the same as "free".
• It's a lot easier to pontificate about the importance of change than it is to do things differently.
• There is a lot of research out there. Some of it is useful. 
• Empirical evidence doesn't need to be quantitative...but it does need to be a little more robust than simply pointing to people who are doing the same things.
• Quality is rarely absolute. It's contextual and situational. It may make more sense to think about "effective practices" rather than "best practice".
• Practitioners who make big sweeping statements without doing any background work on what others may have already been doing, saying or thinking end up sounding just a little bit naive and foolish. C'mon, people...use The Google.
• On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog...but EVERYONE knows if you are not prepared.
• One can pack a lot of snark in 140 characters.
• Learning is as natural as breathing. Learning really isn't the problem. Enabling meaningful, intentional outcomes and creating experiences that engage and inspire without costing an arm and a leg and without killing our interest and enthusiam for learning is the problem. 
• Sometimes you just need to show up.

Comments

[Karlakmetz.wordpress.com]

Great list, a helpful summary of items to research and news to share with my team. I'm glad to hear Second Life is out, it is not very accessible to students with vision disabilities.

[Ellen Wagner]

agree, Allison. It's not the immersive experiences that are dead...those are going to get even more important. It's the specific platform du jour. I chaired a session at OEB in which three different groups - one from Norway, one from Germany and one from Spain - were reviewing student and faculty technology use patterns of the recent year. And in all three cases, Second Life use had dropped like a stone. Gartner Research shows Second life at the bottom of the "Trough of Disillusionment". This will change of course....but for now, people are looking for more for the investment of time, energy.

[Allison Rossett]

Enjoyed the list and the conference tour.

I think that maybe we consign Second Life to the scrapheap of history too swiftly. Admittedly, I would have kissed SL good bye six months ago. Those avatars annoyed me.

But today, no.

I am evaluating a SL program and have been stunned at how much they liked the experience. And since working on it, I've been noodling around on SL alternatives.

The point isn't Second Life. The point in immersive experiences, more authentic than typical scenario based elearning.

So maybe we don't say bye bye to SL-ish experiences, not quite yet.

[Distance Learning]

Congratulations guys, you made it this far but there are still a lot to learn. By then, happy learning to that new thing.