By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. So You Want to Be an E-Learning Consultant...
Many of the people I know in this field have become consultants. In this article, Harold Jarche talks about developing your business as a consultant and the challenges faced by freelancers. And yes, Harold, you should have included the importance of long bike rides and the resulting thinking time. Still, consulting isn't for everyone. My own career has taken exactly the opposite tack - I work for the government. Though there's a lot of overhead and paperwork, I enjoy a different type of freedom: the steady income that allows me to not worry about running advertising, offending clients, and the whole client-server relationship. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Use of E-Learning Is Up
According to a recently released ASTD report, one third of workplace learning is now e-learning, with about two thirds of that being self-study and one third instructor-led online classes. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Adobe Joins the eLearning Industry
Jay Cross reports, "Adobe's Ellen Wagner, who coordinated the event, made it clear that Adobe intended to be a major player in eLearning." Adobe people have told me that they don't want to own the field, that what they want to do is to enable people to create. Products like Premiere (now reinstalled on the Windows part of my machine) speak in favour of that vision. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Elearning07 : Podcast Downloads
Very nice. "Thanks to the superhuman efforts of Robyn Jay and Stephan Ridgway over the weekend we now have the complete recording from all panels at Elearning07." That adds up to something like 50 podcasts from different topic-based teams looking at topics ranging from "how contemporary e-learning methodologies challenge the status quo" to "digital literacy skills" to "using social networking spaces to engage youth". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. In Search of Student-Generated Content in Online Education
The abstract sets it up nicely: "Enabling students to create their own educational content increases engagement, improves learning, and can result in products of lasting value. So why are effective examples of student-generated content in online education so hard to find?" the answer is that there are so few of them to find. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Elearning Samples
A nice (and long) list of examples of e-learning (and it's instructive to look at some of the things here, such as RSS in Plain English, Homestand (about minor league baseball), or Airport Security, and compare them to what we thought 'learning objects' should be - no metadata, no 'wrappers' - no pedagogical properties per se - but great learning. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. eLearning07 Conference Centre On Jokaydia!
Starting in a couple of days is the E-Learning 07 conference (check out their use of protopage to provide a genuinely living and interactive conference web page). This link is to an introduction of the Second Life presence for the conference, hosted in jokaydia. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. ROI and Metrics in eLearning
The Washington Monthly's ranking of universities (which I learned about, of course, on the Colbert Report) is based on outputs, not inputs. But it may be no less problematic. The magazine counts the number of PhDs and the number of graduates who enter the military - not exactly the counts that remind one of learning. And in the same vein, Tony Karrer summarizes numerous articles that look at Return on Investment (ROI) and e-learning. Equally a morass. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Great E-Learning Books Summarized
This is an interesting series, with summaries of books by people such as Clark Aldrich, Karl Kapp, Willie Horton, and others, offered by e-LearningGuru. The first thing I noticed (I'm so vain) was that they didn't summarize my work! But then I realized, I haven't written a book. Not one with hard covers and ISBN numbers, at least - though I have a few ebooks collecting dust on my website. But I could have. So could lots of us. Why should the people who gave it up to the publishers be given special treatment? Now I don't have time to write these, but I'll make you a deal - if you write them, I'll post them here or link to them (whichever you prefer). Take a look at these to get an idea of the style, then do the same for your favorite e-learning blogger or writer. More...