7^th International Conference on Technology Supported Learning & Training,
November 28-30, 2001

One thousand people from 45 countries attended the 7^th annual Online Educa in Berlin. I was one of 43 from the U.S.

Senator Juliane Freifrau von Friesen opened the gathering, saying "The sky is the limit with technology. Content is the issue." Next, Secretary of State of the Federal Ministry of Education and Research Dr.-Ing. E. h. Uwe Thomas told us that we really don’t know much about how people learn. The great challenges are dealing with interactive instead of receptive learners, understanding the process of learning, and maintaining quality.

Richard C. Larson, the professor in charge of MIT‘s distance learning programs, echoed that "we have to learn how people learn."

The DeWitt Clinton

Larson showed a picture of the DeWitt Clinton, pointing out that the locomotive was, for 1831, a state-of-the-art machine; however, the passenger cars are clearly just stagecoaches set on railway wheels. This is similar to eLearning today, where there’s a wickedly fast networked PC up front, pulling a string of passive lectures.

Online Educa runs eight concurrent breakout sessions, so you only get to sample a limited slice of what’s going on. A few highlights:

IBM’s Colin Harrison talked about the changing nature of work and how to route information to virtual employees in tomorrow’s "fuzzy enterprise." Work has changed like the old Hollywood Studio system. Originally, the studio owned everything -- the sets, the equipment, contracts with actors. Now, movies are made by project teams. Sometimes a company is formed just to do one picture. And now workers are eLancing and self-directed. A job at IBM is a license to find work within IBM. An "aware business" of the future needs "operational intelligence." A group of consultants take lengthy notes, but when they return home, their expense reporting is better automated than their information capture. The operationally intelligent organization must sense and respond immediately to changes in the market.

Jay's keynote

Uwe Thomas

Eilif Trondsen described learning across the enterprise. Corporate learning began with formal learning modeled after schools and delivered in big chunks. Knowledge management began with informal learning, modeled to support work and comprised of small chunks.

Collaboration began seeding the formal learning side with the informal lessons. Also, learning broadened to cover other players in the value chain.

Gunnar Brückner and Hal Richman illustrated the effectiveness of Informal Learning and Collaboration in the United Nations Development Programme. Research shows that 70% of learning in organizations is informal, so instead of leaving it to chance, UNDP concentrates on making informal learning successful. For example, UNDP decided to invest in learning, not in a Learning Management System. More than a hundred learning managers advocate continuous learning and staff development in local offices. Giving them something to work with, UNDP has allocated 5% of all staff time to learning. The UNDP is clearly taking an innovative approach and compared to corporate efforts with less reach, they are managing to do it on a shoestring.

In Europe, academia and the private sector are closer than in the U.S. Nonetheless, Online Educa is heavily academic in nature. Some of the breakouts conjured up images of Herr Professor Hegel drifting into the lecture hall at Heidelberg with his shoes untied to read his notes to his students. Mercifully, individual presentations were limited to 20 minutes instead of Hegel’s three-hour lectures. Jokes from the podium were extremely rare.

I have cut the talk into five smaller chunks, if you'd prefer to look at it that way. These are PowerPoint files.

Berlin1, 1057 KB, Introduction & early days of eLearning

Berlin2, 627 KB, Napoleon's march to Moscow

Berlin3, 3184 KB, 1000 new hires' march to customer service

Berlin4, 1224 KB, shifts in corporate motivation and eLearning at Unisys, Dell, & Sun

Berlin5, 2697 KB, next: personalization, meta-learning, integration, and best practices

Robert Ottiger of the Fachhochschule bei der Basel described MailTack, a tool for Individual Knowledge Management. "MailTack helps the individual at two levels:

• in managing her personal knowledge assets (individual level)
• in using the new opportunities provided by organisational KM like participating in organisation-wide networked knowledge sharing (organisational level)."

Fellows of the Meta-Learning Lab will be interested in this tool, for it is used for exploring the development of individual professionals by promoting:

• finding out what I know, also if I remember it vaguely
• reusing what I know
• sharing what I know
• finding out what other know
• reusing what other know
• ensuring that what I say is interpreted the way I intend
• ensuring that I understand what is said the way it is intended
• raising new issues
• justifying positions
• questioning and answering
• negotiating and structuring controvers