my guess is that it'll be like getting an office suite with a new computer. once enterprise class solutions with extensive integration (I listened to most of Sam Adkins presention) reach a certain market proliferation, we're probably going to get these systems in education whether we choose to use them or not.

my problem is, though, that educational products built on corporate production models are going to going to be exactly that--educational models with a heavy emphasis on corprate needs--even though i do recognize that elarning within the business community seems to have moved progressively in the last decade.

i just hope that the computers and writing community within my discipline can become more active in elearning before it's too late to help shape the educational systems being developed.

I listened to the Adkins presentation as well...interesting...but I agree with your observations, Charlie. Higher education is at risk of (or in the process of?) commercialization. Higher education's inability or unwillingness to make sense of elearning has resulted in a dramatic shift to corporate control of learning.

Personally, I like some of the shake up going on in education. Universities and colleges are waking up to the reality that for-profit education organizations (like U of Phoenix) are going after their students. Instead of taking 2 years off work to finish an MBA, students can now complete the degree online.

Educators often blame corporate/for-profit universities for disrupting (ruining?) the education market. This is not true. Larger societal forces (information society, technological advances, KM, globalization) have disrupted the education market. Colleges and universities, unfortunately, have been slow responding to this. They are still trying to educate students for a society that no longer exists. (Is that too harsh? :))

Probably not harsh enough. Students and the rest of society seem to be leaving education way behind. When I think about Moore's Law and what it tells us about the advances in technology, then I look at pedagogical theory, it seems to me that education takes small steps while technology increases exponentially. And todays technology is about knowledge and information, which used to be the monopoly of the academy.

Look at the Internet and electronic communication and how things have changed in the last ten years:

How about blogging, the software that truly does make anyone an author on the Internet, which has now reached half a million sites?

Meanwhile, my wife communicates with her family off and on all day via IM, even though they live half a state away, and conducts business over it as well.

Online banking and debit cards are replacing writing checks and balancing the checkbooks. P2P networks and file sharing. Video games with Toy Story quality graphics for entertainment.

The digital cable box I just got--it's only five dollars more than our previous service since I got broadband--gives forty more channels of tv and about 30 music channels. I remember having to move the rabbit ears just to get a few channels of information.

And what about Korea, with over 80% of the households to have broadband by the end of this year. How long before our country reaches that mark? Not long at all.

There's virtually an unlimited amount of information available via television and the Internet, and in more seductive new formats all the time (whatever happened to the family encyclopdia :). The Ivory Tower model--here's the basics of what you need to know, here's how to think about it--is no longer valid. Until higher learning reorients itself toward showing students how to find and process information, then how to publish their own ideas electronically, instead of being so focused on providing the content, education will still continue to fall behind.

Me, I'm enjoying the rides. But the people outside the theme park have no idea that both the quality and the number of rides follows Moore's law into an ever-expanding virtual landscape.