December 03, 2006

A banquet of well-oiled e-learning dishes

For me, the Online Educa in Berlin was such a banquet of well-oiled e-learning dishes and it truly has become my personal highlight in the year. This gourmet table was loaded with piles of international delicacies and 2012 participants from 92 countries testified to its popularity.

The main conference program on November 30th to December 1st was filled with 126 hours of program consisting of approx. 350 presentations, discussions and net-working activities. These two days were preceeded by another two days of pre-conference workshops of yet again another 117 hours of program in 10 full-day and 15 half-day workshops. If you were to stretch the Online Educa over a normal working week, you could easily fill 6 weeks of program!

As you can imagine it has been extremely difficult to choose what to listen to

and even more difficult to decide whether to give a session a miss, so as to have time to sit and talk to people you only see once a year.

I chose to listen to Prof Gilly Salmon's 'Developing Online Teachers' and to attend her knowledge cafe, which was great. Then I was looking forward to learning more about this fascinating topic 'Open Courseware' which was initiated by MIT, who started to put their courses online about 2 or 3 years ago bewildering the academic world. Todate already 87,000 courses are freely accessible online and the Open Courseware movement has been supported by Universities in Japan, China and many other places.

As many of you know me, my key focus when checking out trends at the Online Educa is the importance of teaching and learning live online in a virtual classroom environment. Last year Nigel Paine of the BBC mentioned his excitement having attended an event in Elluminate. Also last year the University of Utrecht presented a language teaching pilot project using video conferencing in peer-to-peer activities.

This year, yet again there were only few mentionings of learning in a virtual classroom environment. Amongst others Jean-Michel Billaut, who demonstrated a live sales and training application of an Internet shop website, using video and Voice over IP to talk to a potential customer, webtouring the shop and screen-sharing product demonstration files. This however was mentioned in the context of his political ambitions to network France and Europe with fibre-optic cables. Little does he know, that these systems have been used by dial-up users for several years. Then there was another mentioning on German lessons using a virtual classroom environment, which I sadly missed.

Equally sparse was the presence of vendors of virtual classrooms amongst exhibitors. Some of the few I talked to were Horizon Wimba and Elluminate. Interesting to note, that both Horizon Wimba (close ally to WebCT which has recently been purchased by Blackboard) and Elluminate (now twinned with Desire2Learn) are the only two solutions I know who have never forsaken their focus on live learning, whilst many others were quick to discover that more money can be made with live meetings in the corporate world.

Yes, trend spotting at the Online Educa confirmed: the topic 'learning in virtual classrooms' is still no frequently talked about subject as of yet.

This coincides with my predictions, that Web 3.0 is still to come.

Web 1.0 essentially were static webpages, this was the socalled 'read only web' and Web 2.0 is the 'read and write web'. Web 2.0 applications are forums, blogs and wikis, social software, podcasting and video publishing.

If my predictions are correct, Web 3.0 then will be the 'read/write and chat web' with applications such as Instant Messaging, live voice or text chat in support or sales (the 'talk to us' instead of 'contact us' button on a website), web conferencing, live online events, webinars, webcasts and more. This is still to come.

Forerunners, such as IBM and Cisco both mentioned their daily usage of Instant Messaging between employees, something that is still not common practise by many companies worldwide.

Last but not least, I need to mention the presentation which I did on LANCELOT,

Posted on December 03, 2006 at 11:16 AM

Pings and Trackbacks

TrackBack URL for this article: