Robert Grégoire:
"I attempted to summarize your three critical points for the future of e-learning. I am afraid I caught mostly the main ideas and lack a bit in the context in terms of why each area will be so important for the future of e-learning. I would be very grateful if you'd have a chance to audit these words I'm quoting you on. "
Griff Richards:
"I think it was Neils Bohr who said "Predictions are hard to make, especially about the future". However, if I look around at the activity here and abroad, e learning seems to divide into 2 camps - the content side and the process side. The content side is all about creating more and better content, and putting it into repositories so it can be retrieved and re-used when required by others. A huge amount of effort is taking place on this effort, and it touches on the emergence of the semantic web where meaningful links can be used to make automated decisions about the value and relative usefulness of content and processes. Up to this point, most of the process people have been looking at are the communications aspects of e-learning - mostly human conferencing and constructivist activities. However, XML has given us a tool to describe content with meaningful labels, and it has been a boon to the expression of standards for metadata, and in Koper's EML, a way to describe educational activities - processes which hitherto had been hardcoded in proprietary templates.
Of course the effect of these technologies is that they enable disparate communities to exchange content including activities. The content becomes free of the LCMS or authoring system in which it was developed. Along with these open standards, we are moving towards greater sharing and wider communities. Perhaps this rapid development of self-aggregating communities will be the most important outcome. We are a long way away from universal access to e-learning. The culture of the web does not extend equally to all parts of the world. I would keep an eye on open source initiatives as well - many parts of the world are making a political decision to only allow open source software into their schools. This might seem as a large magnanimous potlatch, but it really is a shift in business model from selling software, to selling support services. The advantage to the users is that there may be more variety of solutions and the material that is created by teachers is not held ransom by some software licence that has to be renegotiated every few years."
1:13:21 PM 
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