From the wish-I-was-there Department, here’s a review of Stephen Downes’ keynote at ITI.

There are few people that can be called “visionary”. I’ve met very few. Very few can pass my tests over and over because often, you discover they had one idea and the rest is just fluff or posturing. Stephen is the real thing. That doesn’t mean he makes a lot of friends in the way. However, maybe the people who should listen to him just don’t understand him and that’s why he doesn’t get shot.

A few years ago, I remember hearing the word eLearning for the first time. I had accepted a job with NRC circa 2001. I knew there was an eLearning team in Moncton. I remember thinking they were lucky because Moncton is a relatively cool city.

I vaguely remember meeting Stephen Downes for the first time. He probably doesn’t remember me though. I was in a basement and had nothing close to an office. It wasn’t so bad though, but because very quickly we moved to a beautiful office where I had a gigantic office. In any case, I see this tall angry man come in and try to plug is laptop. Can’t remember what wasn’t working, but I remember he was quite angry. This was eLearning for me at the time.

Fast-forward a few years. I’ve grown convinced that eLearning is there to stay. As Stephen might put it: we’ve now integrated technology without changing our ways in any fundamental manner. Next step is to change our ways. Gone will be the lecture halls. Campuses will be lifestyle choices.

It is easy to predict such revolutions, but you need evidence to back your statements. Well, blogging is one such sign. I read many exciting blogs by students, but two come to mind right now Claire’s and Didier’s. Claire is struggling to finish her Ph.D. while Didier is probably a top 1% undergraduate student. Of course, there are many examples of exciting blogs by students… but I pick these two because they are great examples. There is a tight integration between the learning process and the content of the blog. The blog is part of the learning process. You can see it live. In Claire’s case, it is not so much the content of her Ph.D. that is integrated with the blog, but rather the process of writting the damn thing and the usual Ph.D. versus employment struggle. Though Claire might have another blog strictly about the content of her Ph.D. As for Didier, he writes about the content of his classes and textbooks.

In many ways, I feel like Didier could be a student at my school. A relatively close student. Claire could be down the hall some place and we could chat about academia, industry and all the usual stuff. But this is happening on-line. This is all happening without a building. There is no brick-and-mortar involved. I suspect I might know a bit more about Didier and Claire than some of their professors do… This is what physical campuses are up against.

Technology in the classroom is not what eLearning is about. eLearning is about abolishing the classroom just like libraries have been abolished. I still go to libraries, but for the lifestyle effect… not to buy books. If I want to buy a book, I do it on-line.

In many ways, on-line learning is more human, it has more soul. It is about real people communicating, becoming part of a rich networking. Learning and growing together.

(Oh! And my blog is a student’s blog as well. I just happen to be on the other side of the fence, the side charging tuitions…)

Found a cool indie musician on inDiscover today: Jody Shelton. I particularly liked All These Sounds.

Go download it all now. It is legal and that’s what the artist wants: to be heard!

Here’s Jody’s bio:

Jody Shelton (songs/keyboards/vocals) is a Tennessee native who began composing music at age 12. By 18, Jody had moved to Chicago and was performing his songs both solo and with a band as well as serving as musical director for the Second City National Touring Company. In 2003, Jody received his degree in film scoring from Berklee College of Music and in the process garnered several awards including the Millican Endowed Scholarship for excellence in composition and the award for best film score of the year for his work on the short film �Balance�. 2004 has seen a new era begin for Jody�s music, performing and recording with some of the best rock musicians in New York City.

Here’s a quote from a post by James Robertson:

If you make sure that you do exactly what the other guys do,
you have made a risk averse decision - you won’t fail any worse than they do,
but you also won’t succeed any better.

Cringely points out that Apple is slowly making the normal retail and marketing process obselete.

This is the end of the RIAA and the big recording industry. Apple in the last year has signed deals with more than 300 independent record labels, most of them not big enough to do much promotion. But now they don’t have to because that promotion will be handled by mtv.com and every music web logger, now that they have a material incentive to make recommendations and print lists. If I recommend a song — IF I JUST TYPE A FEW WORDS — and a thousand people decide to download based on my recommendation, heck, I just made $50 bucks. This is like sending tens of thousands of record sales people out on the road except that they can sell anything THEY like — any of the one million iTunes songs — making them salespeople with real conviction and maybe even with good taste. Maybe.

To me, this is extremely interesting. When the dot-com era started, people began talking about the new economy. It was a catchy phrase, but it turned out to be wrong. There wasn’t a new economy, yet, but mostly an extension of the old one using new tools. However, the new economy is slowly emerging out of the burning ashes of the old one. Here is what is being transformed forever and dramatically: marketing and distribution channels. I think we are moving to a more distributed world. And I have the nagging feeling that Internet publishing will be the core element. We will buy and sell according to what we read and experience on the Web. Who controls that? Right now, the rising force are blogs. Blogs are essentially distributed publishing units. This is where the future lies, maybe.

Yes, I know, everybody runs out of time. All employees in the world have too much work…

But academia is kind of special because you have one of the most complex job description you can imagine. You are a teacher, a researcher, sometimes an engineer, sometimes a manager, sometimes a public speaker, sometimes a consultant and many other things yet, all wrapped in one job. And you are supposed to be very good at all those jobs. You do spend your typical day wearing many hats. I don’t think there are many jobs where you are expected to wear so many hats.

So, what happens? You run out of time. Which means you don’t do certain things. At some point, you learn to say “No”. Everybody has to say no, but I think that professors have to say no far more often than others. I think. But I’m currently wearing my blogger hat, and I have to quickly go back to my must-work-on-funding-application hat so don’t mind me.