Phew! All done and dusted. Christmas and New Year have come and gone, and we find ourselves at the start of 2012 deciding whether to believe the doomsayers, the optimists or more likely having to formulate our own workable opinions somewhere in between.
I lean towards the more optimistic interpretations of the future, if only because I’m old enough now to remember the last recession in the early 1990’s when I returned from America to a rather glum UK. One minute I was working on some really quite interesting early electronic hypertext publishing projects, pre-Web of course, and the next I was looking for any kind of reasonably related job. The one I found was to help to build a brand new MBA programme that in ten years would reform how MBAs could be delivered worldwide. It’s still a beacon of reformation some twenty years later, and one of my personal examples of the value of making risky new investments.
So, what is there for us to reform and renew during 2012? I still think most e-Textbooks are pretty poor quality, even though the e-Reader devices themselves are steadily improving. The one exception I saw this year at Online Educa was the Houghton Mifflin Fuse math applet for the iPad which was pretty good but, I suspect, expensively hand-crafted and medium dedicated.
I still see too much emphasis on enabling e-Tutoring rather than e-Learning, in order to port the “being taught” status-quo online. I still see valuable learning contents languishing because of lack of investment in their futures.
Last year I helped convince three organisations to take a risk and invest in an XML single-source production and management for their courses and programmes. My target for this year is to increase this by an order of magnitude, by putting our new Courseworker for Moodle Cloud service into your hands, so you can get on and do XML single-source production of courses yourself.
This year is starting with new opportunities to reform and renew for me.
Happy New Year.



