Content-type: text/html Downes.ca ~ Stephen's Web ~ No hope and no hype: fear, loathing and learned helplessness at LT2014

Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community

The learning and development guru community was on full display during January's Learning Technologies Exhibition and Conference at Olympia, according to LINE Consulting's 'suzanneo' (please put your name on your blog post, suzanneo!). They were led off by Brian Solis and Marc Presnky, both of whom had the same message, and often, the same slides. The same, ahem, wrong message. "Prensky still bangs on about that old Digital Imigrants / Digital Natives thing, Solis... talks about Generation C – the 'C' standing for connected." And "nothing much was done to repair the situation by a double-headed presentation on disruptive technologies." According to the presenters (probably this track, but we aren't told - suzanneo, if you're going to cite someone, tell us who it is!) the failure to adapt can be traced to leadership - "neither of the presenters had read Michael Neilsen's thoughtful blog post about what (actually) happened."

Suzanneo writes, "This purblindness on the business aspects of disruption was symptomatic in my view of a wider failure in parts of the guru community; an inability or unwillingness to engage with the critical question of exactly why technology innovation in L&D meets so much resistance – and, equally importantly, what can be done to change that attitude." Well, that's one question, but the real issue is the community's unwillingness to engage with changing research and development trends. And it is equally simple-minded to constantly blame PowerPoint for a failure to adapt and learn over ten or so years of presenting at conferences. Maybe the conference itself shares some of the blame - we don't see any of the presentations (no slides, no video) and this just encourages speakers to say the same old thing over and over.

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
stephen@downes.ca

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Last Updated: Apr 19, 2024 8:00 p.m.

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