Stephen Downes (a senior research officer with the National Research Council of Canada, an affiliate of the Council's Institute for Information Technology and currently working with the E-Learning Research Group) has recently published an essay, available here and on his website, 2004: The Turning Point. His website is described thus:
Founded in 1995, Stephen’s Web is best described as a digital research laboratory for innovation in the use of online media in education. More than just a site about online learning, it is intended to demonstrate new directions in the field for practitioners and enthusiasts.
2004: The Turning Point deals with the future of e-Mail, the search for internet community (blogging and 'blogging without writing'), IP communication, attacks on Open Content ('MIT's Open CourseWare project instantly vaporized dozens of business plans. Wikipedia has more readers — and, these days, more clout — than Britannica. Linux is being seen more widely as an alternative to Windows. Open access journals are forcing publishers to retrench') and simulation hype ('Smart people have realized by now that the future of commercial content lies in higher end production that cannot be emulated by a 16 year old with a computer and an attitude. This is why the music industry has turned to music videos as its salvation, the commercial audio track being almost a thing of the past, and this is why the people who consult for the industry have been embracing simulations in a big way').
For me, the most interesting sections, however, are:
Personalization finally works:
Personalization is about choice, and so not surprisingly efforts to personalize within an environment of restricted choice have not been successful. Even technologies as forward looking as RSS have followed thus far the brand-first approach to feed reading. You subscribe to Wired News, or CNet, or Instapundit, and put up with a certain amount of annoying off-topic content to get the stuff you want. But all that's about to change with the advent of topic based (or geography based, or affinity based) mixed feeds.
Learning objects at last:
Much has been made, in some circles at least, of the potential of learning objects. Vast sums of money have been spent on learning management systems that emulate the functionality of those great (and now extinct) e-commerce systems of the nineties. The ... result has been (that) e-learning (is) largely regarded as irrelevant and boring, and while it may be true that students in an authoritarian environment may be forced to learn this way, there is no great enthusiasm, at least, not after the initial pleasure of escaping even more boring lectures has worn off. For all that, learning objects will come to the fore in 2004 or shortly thereafter, but not as cogs in a centrally packaged learning design. Learning objects — or, as some will start calling them, learning resources — will begin to reach their potential outside the mainstream. ... (the demand for) informal learning — as much as 90 percent of learning, according to some estimates ... and therefore the production of learning objects will increase dramatically. Much to the displeasure of those who invested in such content technologies, the vast majority of learning resources will be free, and the internet will be an increasingly viable alternative to a traditional education. Good thing, because funding patterns for traditional education will not change: tuitions will rise, classes will be cut, and the minute independent certification becomes widespread (could be 2004, but probably later) the educational system will enter a full scale crisis from which it will not recover.
'2004 will be looked on as the year in which everything changed, but nothing changed. We will cross some significant barriers in 2004, but the changes that emerge from this turbulent, uncertain year will take several more years to mature. When we look back, we will see that 2004 was a lot like, say, 1996 — the new infrastructure will be in place, but the massive discovery will not yet have taken hold, and the sceptics more often than not will appear to be holding the ground. Don't be fooled by this.'
