OEB: Plenary sessions on Thursday
1.12.2005 @ 14:01 · Signals Käveleminen
Riccardo Petrella gave a wonderful opening keynote on globalisation. Quite opposite to the typical corporate talk you usually hear on the subject in the field of elearning, Petrella forcefully attacked the neo liberal doctrines of growth and competetitivness.
Here are some of the key points of his speech:
- Knowledge should be common good, not a commodity.
- The goal of education should be to better the living conditions of (all) people and to teach to understand and accept differences (He used a metaphor of "learning to say good morning")
- Elearning as it is tends to reduce education to training human resources. When humans are treated as resource, they are forced to compete with technology instead of controlling it.
- Intellectual property rights create new hierarchies and cannot be base for a democratic knowledge society.
I whole heartedly agree with Petrella's points. Suprisingly the rest of the audience seemd to love the speech too.
After Petrella's speech it was back to the standard discourse. Brandon Hall listed some key trends in elearning, mostly from corporative perspective. I'll just list some.
- Funding for training will be more initiative based (This is clearly visible in the academia also, especially in elearning)..
- In the field of "innovations" mobile learning, podcasts, wikis, blogs and the use of news feeds are the way to go (Of course, this is something we knew already).
- Interestingly he brought up Flash as a rising media for education. I have been a bit suspicious about Flash before, but he might just be right on this one. I think AJAX could be a sort of proprietary free alternative to do the stuff you could do with Flash (althought they can be used together, I know), but Flash already has a longer history and larger group of developers on it's side.
Last was Richard Straub from IBM. At this time I was starting to have problems withs focusing: there must have been about a thousand people in the hall (not kidding) and the air was getting thick.
Here's what I could recover from my notes: open standards are good, educators need to have a solid tech base and innovate on a higher level and informal learning is actually much more important than formal. I think this last point is somewhat obvious for corporatyions, but something we should be actively looking into in Universities also.
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