Manufacturing a New Consent: the Arrival of Social Media in Mainstream Culture

Barack Obama has over 100,000 followers on twitter. According to Twitterholic, that’s a lot more than anyone else. On Facebook, Obama has 2.2 million “friends” compared to 745,000 for McCain. On MySpace during the US Presidential Election, Obama had 588,000 friends compared to McCain’s 188,000.

Thanks largely to unprecedented use of the internet, Obama’s campaign attracted 632,000 new donors in September 2008. By some estimates Obama’s internet activities have now raised more than 1 billion dollars since he started campaigning. That’s more than ten times as much as John Kerry raised over the internet just four years ago.

Buzz News

Now read on…

As I discussed last time, the "Propaganda model" views the private media as businesses selling a non-media product — readers and demographic groups — to other businesses (advertisers). The theory postulates five general classes of "filters" that determine the type of news that is presented in news media. These five filters are:

1. Ownership of the medium
2. Medium's funding sources
3. Sourcing
4. Flak
5. Anti-Ideology

Ownership

Herman and Chomsky argue that since mainstream media outlets are either large corporations or part of conglomerates (e.g. Westinghouse or General Electric), the information presented to the public will be biased with respect to these interests. Such conglomerates frequently extend beyond traditional media fields, and thus have extensive financial interests that may be endangered when certain information is widely publicized. According to this reasoning, news items that most endanger the corporate financial interests of those who own the media will face the greatest bias and censorship.

It then follows that if to maximize profit means sacrificing news objectivity, then the news sources that ultimately survive must be fundamentally biased, with regard to news in which they have a conflict of interest.

Funding

Since the mainstream media depend heavily on advertising revenues to survive, the model suggests that the interests of advertisers come before reporting the news. Chomsky and Herman argue that, as a business, a newspaper has a product which it offers to an audience. The product is composed of the affluent readers who buy the newspaper — who also comprise the educated decision-making sector of the population — while the audience includes the businesses that pay to advertise their goods. According to this "filter", the news itself is nothing more than "filler" to get privileged readers to see the advertisements which makes up the real content, and will thus take whatever form is most conducive to attracting educated decision-makers. Stories that conflict with their "buying mood", it is argued, will tend to be marginalized or excluded, along with information that presents a picture of the world that collides with advertisers' interests. The theory argues that the people buying the newspaper are themselves the product which is sold to the businesses that buy advertising space; the news itself has only a marginal role as the product.

Sourcing

The third filter concerns the mass media's need for a continuous flow of information to fill their demand for daily news. In an industrialized economy where consumers demand information on numerous worldwide events unfolding simultaneously, they argue that this task can only be filled by major business and government sectors that have the necessary material resources. This includes mainly The Pentagon and other governmental bodies. Chomsky and Herman then argue that a symbiotic relationship arises between the media and parts of government which is sustained by economic necessity and reciprocity of interest. On the one hand, government and news-promoters strive to make it easier for news organizations to buy their services; according to the authors (p. 22), they

• provide them with facilities in which to gather
• give journalists advance copies of speeches and forthcoming reports
• schedule press conferences at hours well-geared to news deadlines
• write press releases in usable language
• carefully organize their press conferences and "photo opportunity" sessions

On the other hand, the media become reluctant to run articles that will harm corporate interests that provide them with the resources that the media depend upon. Chomsky and Herman state (p. 22),

It is very difficult to call authorities on whom one depends for daily news liars, even if they tell whoppers.

This theoretical relationship also gives rise to a "moral division of labor", in which "officials have and give the facts," and "reporters merely get them". Journalists are then supposed to adopt an uncritical attitude that makes it possible for them to accept corporate values without experiencing cognitive dissonance.

During the year 2005 in the USA, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) criticized the George W. Bush administration for the preparation and distribution of videos which falsely give the impression of being interviews made independently of the administration. The New York Times reported that "more than 20 federal agencies, including the State Department and the Defense Department, now create fake news clips. The Bush administration spent $254 million in its first four years on contracts with public relations firms, more than double the amount spent by the Clinton administration." In April 2008, the New York Times revealed how the US Pentagon and Defense Department traded access to valuable information and powerful decision makers to ex-military officers, many now military contractors, who were parroting administration talking-points and providing favorable "analysis" regarding the Iraq War and related topics on/in major television, radio and print media.

Flak

For Chomsky and Herman "flak" refers to negative responses to a media statement or program. The term "flak" has been used to describe what Chomsky and Herman see as targeted efforts to discredit organizations or individuals who disagree with or cast doubt on the prevailing assumptions which Chomsky and Herman view as favorable to established power (e.g., "The Establishment"). Unlike the first three "filtering" mechanisms — which are derived from analysis of market mechanisms — flak is characterized by concerted and intentional efforts to manage public information.

Flak from the powerful can be either direct or indirect. The direct could include the following hypothetical scenarios:

• Letters or phone calls from the White House to Dan Rather
• Inquiries from the FCC to major television networks requesting documents used to plan and assemble a program
• Messages from irate executives representing advertising agencies or corporate sponsors to media officials threatening retaliation if not granted on-air reply time.

The powerful can also work on the media indirectly by:

• Complaints delivered en masse to their own constituencies (e.g., stockholders, employees) about media bias,
• Generation of mass advertising that does the same,
  By funding watchdog groups or think tanks engineered to expose and attack deviations in media coverage that endanger vital elite interests.
• By funding political campaigns that elect politicians who will be more willing to curb any such media deviations.

Anti-Ideologies

A final filter is anti-ideology. Anti-ideologies exploit public fear and hatred of groups that pose a potential threat, either real, exaggerated, or imagined. Communism once posed the primary threat according to the model. Communism and socialism were portrayed by their detractors as endangering freedoms of speech, movement, press, etc. They argue that such a portrayal was often used as a means to silence voices critical of elite interests.

With the Soviet Union's collapse, proponents of the propaganda model have argued that the functionality and credibility of anti-communism has been fundamentally compromised. Proponents state that new, more functional anathemas have arisen to take its place. Chomsky and Herman argue that one possible replacement for anti-communism seems to have emerged in the form of "anti-terrorism".

I would assert that to an extent social networking and the Read/Write Web has provided a means to enable people to circumvent the traditional filters of information dissemination. I would suggest that attempts to discredit the Obama campaign largely failed (or in some cases even rebounded on the proponents of the flak) due to the availability of information through channels other than the national and local broadcasters and print media, for example.

However, we must ensure our enthusiasm for the seemingly democratic nature of social media is tempered with rational analysis and reflection. In the previous paragraph I said that the RWW negated the five filters "to an extent" because much (but certainly not all) of the information distributed over the channels originated from the Democrat's campaign, and as such must be assessed as adhering to their agenda, to achieve their goals. In this context then, consumers of content would be well-advised to apply the same level of critical thinking to social media channels as to the traditional media.

______________________

References:

Buzz News [Internet] Available from: http://www.culture-buzz.com/blog/Top-5-Barack-Obama-s-Viral-Marketing-1875.html
Accessed 12 November 2008

Herman, E.S., Chomsky, N (2002). Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. Pantheon Books.

Manufacturing dissent: Noam Chomsky and the crisis of the Western Left. [Internet] Available from: http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Manufacturing+dissent:+Noam+Chomsky+and+the+crisis+of+the+Western...-a0127013020 Accessed 12 November 2008

Wikipedia contributors, "Propaganda model" Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model Accessed November 6, 2008.

Social Software: the Runtime Effect

In yesterday’s post I alluded to the idea that Barack Obama’s recent US Presidential Election win could, in no small part, be attributed to his effective utilization of social media, including the use of tools and technologies like YouTube, Facebook, blogs, and even PayPal (and other online payment solutions). Citing James Surowiecki’s 2004 text The Wisdom of Crowds, I indicated the characteristics of crowd wisdom, and outlined the four criteria that separate wise crowds from irrational ones.

Social networking guru Clay Shirky describes the phenomenon of group dynamics mediated through Web 2.0 technologies as a “Run-time effect:”

You cannot specify in advance what the group will do, and so you can't substantiate in software everything you expect to have happen… [but social patterns emerge] that …are core to any software that supports larger, long-lived groups.

…there's this very complicated moment of a group coming together, where enough individuals, for whatever reason, sort of agree that something worthwhile is happening, and the decision they make at that moment is: This is good and must be protected. And at that moment, even if it's subconscious, you start getting group effects. And the effects that we've seen come up over and over and over again in online communities.

I would assert that this is the group run-time effect that was leveraged by the US Democratic Party, and that ultimately galvanized such a substantial number of voters to become involved in the democratic process. Shirky describes a number of ways in which these social patterns manifest themselves including:

Table 1 Run-time effects of groups

Pattern	Characteristics	Example
Identification of enemies	The identification and vilification of external enemies as a driver for group cohesion	The Open Source movement in the mid-Nineties versus Microsoft, as personified by Bill Gates
Veneration	The nomination and worship of an icon or a set of tenets. The pattern is, essentially, we have nominated something that's beyond critique	Negatively criticizing Lord of the Rings on a Tolkien newsgroup or discussion forum

These group patterns emerge on the Internet, not because of the software, but because it's being used by people.

An Idea whose Time has Come

I would suggest that one of the primary reasons that social networking software played such a significant role in the 2008 US Presidential Election was precisely because of the nebulousness and loose structure of the read / write Web. But before we can look at this, it’s worthwhile to understand the role of traditional media in distributing information. As I’m not a broadcast media expert, I will investigate this through the filter of Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s Propaganda Model.*

First presented in their 1988 book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, the "Propaganda model" views the private media as businesses selling a non-media product — readers and demographic groups — to other businesses (advertisers). The theory postulates five general classes of "filters" that determine the type of news that is presented in news media. These five filters are:

1. Ownership of the medium
2. Medium's funding sources
3. Sourcing
4. Flak
5. Anti-communist ideology

I would strongly argue for the position espoused by Herman & Chomsky in Manufacturing Consent that as mass media news outlets are run by large corporations, they are under the same competitive pressures as other businesses. According to the authors, the pressure to create a stable, profitable business invariably distorts the kinds of news items reported, as well as the manner and emphasis in which they are reported. This does not occur as a consequence of market selection: those businesses who happen to favor profits over news quality tend to survive, while those that present a more accurate picture of the world tend to become marginalized. In a nutshell, the Republicans had the politically conservative Fox News to deliver their campaign messages (reflecting the vested interests of powerful lobby groups, trans-national corporations, and the military-industrial complex in maintaining the status quo).

However, ranged against this (probably for the first time in history) was the availability of an alternative set of media channels to disseminate information combined with a new generation of voters familiar and comfortable with the media supported by the Internet.

And that’s what I’ll look at next time.

_________________

References:

Herman, E.S., Chomsky, N (2002). Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. Pantheon Books.

Shirky, C. (2003). A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy. A speech at ETech, April, 2003. [Internet]. Available from: http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html Retrieved 14 October 2008.

Surowiecki J. (2004). The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations. Doubleday.

* …and yes, I’m aware of, and entitled to my own biases – IMFB

--

Collective Knowledge and the Wisdom of Crowds

Today, I’m minded to discuss the concept of the effect of information-sharing on the collective consciousness and individual decision-making (and yes, friends, this series of posts will probably allude to the use of social software in the success of Barak Obama’s recent US Presidential election campaign, and maybe even a little about how we can leverage social software technologies for e-learning).

Now read on…

In his seminal 2004 book The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki discussed the aggregation of information in groups, resulting in decisions that, he asserts, are often better than choices that could have been made by any individual member of a group. The author suggests that typically people look for what he calls the “single decision-maker;” an acknowledged expert who uses their judgment to provide solutions or answers, whereas the better strategy is probably to look for “as diverse and wide a pool of decision-makers as [possible].”

Table 1 Characteristics of crowd wisdom

Cognition	Market judgment, which Surowiecki argues can be much faster, more reliable, and less subject to political forces than the deliberations of experts or expert committees.
Coordination	Common understanding within a culture allows remarkably accurate judgments about specific reactions of other members of the culture. For example, knowing the Rules of the Road has the benefit of optimizing traffic flows.
Cooperation	How groups of people can form networks of trust without a central system controlling their behavior or directly enforcing their compliance.

However, we know that not all groups are wise. Consider, for example, violent mobs, investors in stock market bubbles, or property developers in Ireland in the second half of this decade. According to Surowiecki, four criteria separate wise crowds from irrational ones:

• Diversity of opinion
  • Each person should have private information even if it's just an eccentric interpretation of the known facts.
• Independence
  • People's opinions aren't determined by the opinions of those around them.
• Decentralization
  • People are able to specialize and draw on local knowledge.
• Aggregation
  • Some mechanism exists for turning private judgments into a collective decision.

Clay Shirky (2003) asserts that there was no real means for any group to meet these four criteria until the emergence of social software:

Prior to the Internet, the last technology that had any real effect on the way people sat down and talked together was the table. There was no technological mediation for group conversations. The closest we got was the conference call, which never really worked right -- "Hello? Do I push this button now? Oh, shoot, I just hung up." It's not easy to set up a conference call, but it's very easy to email five of your friends and say "Hey, where are we going for pizza?" So ridiculously easy group forming is really news.

It can be said that e-mail, blogs, wikis and so on are not social per se: Shirky considers that these technologies enable other communications channels including broadcasting (spam), one-to-one (SMS texting), and one-to-many (blogs), as much as collaborative interaction. More accurately, network-based internet technologies are not necessarily social, but they can support social patterns.

More…

_________________

References:

Shirky, C. (2003). A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy. A speech at ETech, April, 2003. [Internet]. Available from: http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html Retrieved 14 October 2008.

Surowiecki J. (2004). The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations. Doubleday.

E-Learning and the Economic Downturn: April Update

It's just over two months since I posted on Recession and the Challenge to E-learning. It's a subject that I said I would monitoring as the "Credit Crunch" became a downturn, which may or may not lead to a recession.

As a reminder, at the time I suggested that the appropriate social and economic innovations required to support e-learning were now sufficiently embedded (compared to 2001) to ensure the e-learning industry would certainly survive and maybe even thrive an economic downturn. I tempered this assertion by asking

will the positive economic, organisational, and social value of e-learning outweigh traditional human responses to recessionary times? What strategies can we use to ensure the survival of and even the growth of e-learning as an industry in these changing times?

Now read on...

Some preliminary evidence is now emerging which may indicate that the E-learning Industry is doing quite in the current economic climate. Electric News Net (ENN) has reported that SkillSoft and ThirdForce two of the largest Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) producers of e-learning content have posted profits for the last quarter and the year, respectively.

According to ENN,

e-learning firm SkillSoft posted another great set of quarterly results with revenues up by 34 percent and profits nearly quadrupling. Coming off the back of a third quarter where profits nearly trebled SkillSoft managed to perform even better in the fourth quarter as it posted profits of USD34.3 million, up from USD8.2 million for the same quarter the previous year.

SkillSoft say that the increase in revenue was down to:

• higher-than-planned rates of contract retention and renewal
• incremental revenues of USD4.6 million related to the amortisation of deferred revenue acquired by SkillSoft in the acquisition of NETg
• incremental revenues from NETg customer contracts which were renewed after acquisition

ThirdForce has seen its operating profit up by 160 per cent for 2007, while revenue increased by 35 per cent for the same period. Since acquiring MindLeaders, the US has become a key market for ThirdForce, and the company says it is targeting US companies in the sub-Fortune 1,000 sector. In the UK, ThirdForce is continuing to see growth in its core hospitality market, adding a number of multi-year contracts with major clients during 2007.

Analysis
At face value, these results look very positive, but these revenue reports are now a matter of history. Certainly in the case of ThirdForce, the results are based on performance before the current downturn really began to bite, and as such I don't know if the results can be interpreted in terms of how the organization is performing in 08H1. It will be interesting to see how their strategy of growing their presence in the sub-Fortune 1,000 marketspace, given the fact that both SkillSoft and ThirdForce are headquartered in the Euro Zone, and given the current Dollar weakness against the Euro.

Similarly, a presence in the UK market would have at one time been viewed as a triple-bound low-risk revenue generator, but again, the current Sterling to Euro differential may mitigate against growth in that territory.

Dilemma
Consider the dilemma for both organizations: they both have substantial interests in territories with weakening currencies. Their sales and revenue numbers for 2008 - say arbitrarily $10M or €7.7M (at December 2007 exchange rates) - would have been agreed in 2007Q3, and strategies would have been put in place to meet those objectives. Now, even if the sales teams hit their targets numerically, they are struggling in a weakened Dollar situation where their $10M is now worth €6.3M - a substantial shortfall in revenue.

However, what's more interesting to me is that both organizations' customers intend to either renew or extend their current contracts with the two content providers. In my view, this indicates the increasingly positive reaction to and growing reliance upon e-learning as means of meeting employee training and development requirements. Is it trend that will be reflected across markets generally?

We'll see.

It's still early days, and no doubt I will be returning to this topic presently.

--

Do Generation Xers learn differently to Boomers and the Internet Generation?

A colleague asked me recently "do you take somebody's age into account when designing and delivering training for them?"

As a learning professional in the IT industry, it's my job to provide learning resources for the employees in my organization. Broadly speaking, my colleagues were born between 1965 and 1982 - the so-called Generation X cohort, with a number of people born before this date range (who the Americans call 'Baby Boomers') and a few - increasing - new hires born after this time, variously called Generation Y, the Net Generation, self-regarding narcissists, Generation Next , depending on who you ask.

My colleague's question got me thinking: as well as individual learning styles (VAK, multiple intelligences and so on) are there generational learning styles? More specifically, is it the case that the technology you were exposed to as a child has some effect on the way you learn throughout your life? As an extension of this, are learning professionals using the most effective channels to enable learners to develop their skills, knowledge and experience in further education and workplace environments, or are we 'boxed in' by unconscious biases determined by the teaching approaches, technologies and media we ourselves were taught with?

I haven't carried out much research on this question, but have the educational media types and attendant technologies described in Table 1 'hard-wired' each generation's cognitive processes to acquire knowledge in specific ways?

Table 1. Generational learning modalities

Generation	Paradigm	Educational Media Types
Boomer	Analog	Projected Slides Overhead projector Film Reel-to-reel tape Slide Rule
GenX	Transistor	All the above as well as… Cassette Tape Video tape Electronic Calculator Personal computers (Apple II, Commodore PET etc)
Gen Next	Microprocessor	All the above as well as… CD-ROM (Early CBT) DVD PowerPoint Personal Computers (IBM PC, Windows 3.1) Internet 1.0 (Alta Vista, Yahoo! Discussion Forums etc) Internet Messenger Mobile (cellular) phones
Millennial	Networked	Some of the above as well as… Web 2.0 Web-based training/online educational resources Personal laptops/PDAs Blogs Wikis Podcasts Second Life Social Networking

Marc Prensky would say that there is some validity in this. As he asserted in his seminal article Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants, we can say that there is a well-established divide between those born pre- and post-1990 - Gartner, in their 2008 Symposium, recognized that the generation now entering the workplace "think different" (to appropriate a phrase).

Could the same be said for Boomers and Xers and does this effect the ways people of these groups acquire knowledge? I'm a Gen X kid and I guess we were probably the first generation to have "home computers" (Sinclair ZX Spectrum 16K anyone?) and home gaming systems like the Atari, as well as access to machines like the Apple II and the Commodore PET in a classroom environment. I can't say if having access to this technology changed the way I learned, because using these tools was the way I learned. Similarly, mine was probably the last generation to use log tables in maths class and simultaneously the first generation to use electronic calculators (despite fears at the time that using such gadgets would "weaken the brain" - I kid you not - I heard a teacher use that phrase).

Would I have developed differently if I had been born 10 years earlier and used a slide rule? Or 20 years later, where I could carry out calculations on my mobile phone?

Probably.

I don't know enough about the learning styles of those born in the Baby Boom years to make a judgement about how differently their early development was affected by their environment and the learning tools available to them, but I would make an educated guess that the ongoing learning needs of that generation would require a different strategy to that of Gen Xers, which in turn would require a different approach to how digital natives learn.

Interesting times ahead.

--

E-Learning and economic downturns...

I'm getting some interesting feedback from a variety of sources on my blog post Recession and the challenge to e-learning. Steve McKenzie over at Eduspaces has commented that he considers e-learning to be a "recession buster ...on balance costs for institutions and individuals can be saved."

I completely agree with Steve's assessment; the challenge as I see it, is for e-learning practitioners to address traditional/institutional ways of thinking in organizations about how to leverage the benefits of e-learning - break the habits of a lifetime in a sense.

Most decision makers (i.e. C-level executives) in organizations are from a generation that would not have extensively used e-learning during their formative years. In my experience, they become much more risk-averse during economic downturns and push back on what they see as innovation in tough times.

I'm reminded of a conversation I had with a VP about two years ago. I was working on a proposal to introduce an on-demand pre-classroom training module for a ILT course - a bit of blended learning to reduce the workload on instructors to ensure that learners were of an appropriate skill level to actually attend the course in question. His response to the proposal was along the lines of "it's all very well being leading edge, but we don't have to be bleeding edge."

Now, this was hardly an all-singing, all-dancing 3D PLE we were proposing here, just a little 30-minute Flash-based presentation. I think that the assertion this VP made represents that we, as learning professionals, have to be cognisant of more conservative attitudes that exist in the workplace, and we need to develop strategies to counter such lines of argument.

--

Recession and the challenge to e-learning

A colleague in an area of business other than the learning industry asked me a few days ago; "Do you think that e-learning will survive a recession?"

My initial response to her was "there's no recession... yet!" Later, I reflected on the implications of the current economic slowdown (whether or not it turns into a recession) for the e-learning industry.

The dialectic I am presenting here can be summarised in the following manner: will the positive economic, organisational, and social value of e-learning outweigh traditional human responses to recessionary times? What strategies can we use to ensure the survival of and even the growth of e-learning as an industry in these changing times?

So what's changed in the e-learning industry since the last recession in 2001? I've outlined some discussion points below:

1. First of all: Traditional business practise
2. Developments in Infrastructure & Hardware
3. The E-learning Hype curve
4. Refinements in Content Development Methodologies
5. The Rise if the Read/Write Web
6. The Playstation Generation - Digital Natives in the workplace
   

Scroll down to find out more about each of these points.

--

Traditional business practise
Historically, when a slowdown or company rationalisation occurs, the first against the wall are the folks in the PR, marketing, and training departments. Typically, individuals and organisations revert to previously-learned behaviours in tough times; this usually means going through the process of carrying out tried-and-tested, though not necessarily logical responses to the problems put in front of them. The rationale is as follows:

• Profits are down
• Revenue projections aren't great for the next 12/18 months
• We need to cut our costs
• We need to keep the guys that make the widgets (we need to have product to sell)
• We need to keep the managers of these people (or productivity will go down)
• We need to keep Human Resources in place to manage everyone obviously (it's just a coincidence that I - that is the decision-maker - work in HR!)
• What about those training people? High travel costs for the ILT guys, they pull people out of work for 3 days to go on courses. Large budgets spent on implementing and maintaining an LMS/LCMS, third-party e-learning libraries, custom courseware etc, but they do seem to add value to the organisation. And let's face it, they don't really improve the quality of our product, because they never convince us with their ROI metrics...

• Outcome: tea and sympathetic chat, and the Training team get their pink slips / P45s.

Sadly, I reckon that this will be strategy undertaken by a significant number of organisations over the next year or so. However....

...and it's a big however.

Let's look at the evidence for factors that have changed in the e-learning industry since 2001 and the recession following the Dot-Com crash.

Infrastructure & Hardware
More-or-less general availability of high-speed internet access just wasn't there in 2001. To take the example of the company I worked for at the time, our high-quality courseware was developed in Authorware and Director and delivered to customers on CD-ROM for distribution via their intranet or accessed directly from the disk. Our on-line courseware was a 'lite' version of the CD material - not out of choice, but because of the limited functionality that could be provided to a user via a 56k connection.

Over-compressed images, poor animation, and very poor audio - hardly the immersive learning solution that e-learning flattered to promise at the time. Assuming the learner could access the content successfully, the chances were that the PC (for it was always a PC) that they were using to view their content was processing and displaying the date at a rate that we wouldn't find acceptable on a PDA now (screen-size excluded). Pentium or pre-Pentium processors, 8-bit sound cards, 16 colours, 800x600 pixel displays. And so on.

In short, we could see the potential, but our imaginations exceeded the available technology.

The e-learning hype curve
This brings me neatly to the e-learning hype curve (see Figure 1). Kevin Kruse described 2001 as the year that

...brought the harsh, steep slope of unfulfilled promises. Several high-profile providers shut their doors while many more announced large-scale layoffs in the face of missed revenue targets and crashing stock prices. E-learning advocates retreated to the more defensible ground of "blended learning. This year [went] down as the Trough of Despair.

Figure 1. The E-learning Hype Cycle

I would suggest through familiarisation and use, learners expectations are more reasonable about what can be achieved (and perhaps more importantly how it can be achieved through digitally mediated delivery). Given this environment, organisations are now more willing to invest in e-learning as part of their overall training strategy. But is it perceived as a necessity or a luxury?

I can't answer that question right now. I suspect that I will be able to answer it 12 months from now, because there will be evidence as to whether decision makers consider e-learning to be a core requirement that effectively meets organisations' training needs.

Content development methodologies
This kind of ties in with this month's Learning Circuits Big Question about instructional design. Without going into the history of this too much, the development of (relatively) easy-to-use authoring tools like Captivate, Articulate (and a whole raft of others), Rapid E-Learning development methodology and the disintermediation principle means that e-learning has fewer up-front costs associated with it than at the turn of the century.

Similarly, if it's done correctly at the outset, ongoing maintenance and support costs are lower than they ever have been. By developing content with smaller, more flexible teams, the value proposition of e-learning has been enhanced, and the total cost of ownership has been significantly reduced. Outside of e-learning, the take-up of podcasting and streamed media on sites like Blogger and YouTube demonstrates that this ease-of-use of tools and technologies has extended into the community at large.

The Read/Write Web
Who would have thought in 2000 that blogging, social networking, wikis and podcasts would be as big a part of life as they are now? At the start of the century, the Web (and e-learning) could at best be described as a half-duplex medium; it was pretty much all one-way traffic. The development of information platforms has facilitated knowledge-sharing, folksonomies, social interaction, and, key to all this, reciprocity.

We now live in a multiplex world of many voices and ideas, mediated by the internet. At the forefront in using these web technologies is the e-learning industry. By using these tools to develop content I feel we can demonstrate quite effectively that e-learning has a value now that it did not have a decade ago. I would assert that this is particularly true if you take a social-constructivist approach to learning. By the way, I'm happy to entertain debates about the role of formal as opposed to non-formal and informal learning in this environment.

The Playstation Generation
Concomitant with the read/write web is the Playstation generation that have grown up over the last number of years. In his seminal essay Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants (2001), Marc Prensky declares:

...students have changed radically. Today’s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach.

Today’s students have not just changed incrementally from those of the past, nor simply changed their slang, clothes, body adornments, or styles, as has happened between generations previously. A really big discontinuity has taken place. One might even call it a “singularity” – an event which changes things so fundamentally that there is absolutely no going back. This so-called “singularity” is the arrival and rapid dissemination of digital technology in the last decades of the 20th century.

Today’s students – K through college – represent the first generations to grow up with this new technology. They have spent their entire lives surrounded by and using computers, videogames, digital music players, video cams, cell phones, and all the other toys and tools of the digital age. Today’s average college graduates have spent less than 5,000 hours of their lives reading, but over 10,000 hours playing video games (not to mention 20,000 hours watching TV). Computer games, email, the Internet, cell phones and instant messaging are integral parts of their lives.

Extending from this, there is a generation of workers who are comfortable with and practised in the concepts and use of e-learning - take a look at the resources available on www.skoool.ie, an initiative for second-level students in Ireland. I was involved in the development of the first iteration of this site, and it's changed a lot (for the better) since we took those first steps creating it 8 years ago. Similarly in third-level education, there have been significant developments in on-line learning, and I think that it's fair to say that it has become quite embedded in the pedagogy employed by universities: tools like Moodle enable students to upload coursework, take tests, build their own knowledgebases and wikis, and have on-line discussions through a single point of access.

This generation is in the workplace right now. It will expect to learn new skills as their careers develop using the tools that they have always learned on in the past: that is, by using e-learning.

Conclusion
I've left loads of stuff out here; this is a blog entry, not an essay. But consider other factors including transport costs and training in the era of $100 a barrel oil and the value of virtual classrooms; the ROI of e-learning as opposed to traditional methods; even the impact of traditional ways of teaching on the environment ("e-learning" becomes "eco-learning" anyone?).

I may well return to this topic again. But at this point I want to put the question out there: how do you think e-learning will fare in the next 18 months, particularly if there are tough times ahead?


References:

Kruse, K. (2002) The State of e-Learning: Looking at History with the Technology Hype Cycle. [Internet] Available from: http://www.e-learningguru.com/articles/hype1_1.htm [Accessed 12th February 2008]

Prensky, M. (2001) Digital Natives, Digital Immigrats. [Internet] Available from: http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/
Prensky%20-%20Digital%20Natives,%20Digital%20
Immigrants%20-%20Part1.pdf [Accessed 14th February 2008]

--