Thursday night I addressed an International Policy Forum on the Internet and Society at Oxford University, to help kickoff a workshop on the theme of “The Next Level in E-Learning”. I did have plenty of positive things to say, but my comments on “E-Learning”, “Learning Objects” and related phenomena were not among the positive things! Quick story is here, my slides to be available shortly.

…The speech, equally dismissive of “Learning Management Systems”, “Learning Objects”, “Virtual Learning Environments”, and meta-tagging standards such as IMS, was nevertheless up-beat and forward-looking in terms of the possibilities for integrating new technologies into creative learning experiences. Items in the “what works” column included star teachers, social networking, simulations, peer-to-peer networks, certain “banned” games, and tasks that engendered creativity and content ownership directly in learners — including numerous examples cited from KMi’s own long experience in this arena. The greates challenges, argued Eisenstadt, were to “attain results at large scale, maintain a degree of warmth and humanity that is often lost in digital media, and ensure the buy-in of the highly over-stretched teaching workforce.” The Open University itself was cited as an acknowledged success in getting all these ingredients right, and a potentially valuable model for how to proceed. …

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