Does content still have value?

Answer: yes. But the willingness for the consumers of it to pay for the content is going way, way down, to the point that content itself will be offered for free, and additional services around will make the money. It is what the music industry is struggling with (the revenue is in the concert tours not the songs), and it's in fact an old prediction of the Internet bubble gurus. They weren't wrong about everything.

This blog (Will at Work) explains why learning will not escape this trend and makes some predictions. I think everyone in our industry should read this, whether or not you agree.

http://www.willatworklearning.com/2008/06/all-media-force.html

100 Helpful Web Tools for Every Kind of Learner

Fiona King pointed this list of learning tools out to me. The list is categorized via learning styles or kind of learners, such as visual learners (mindmapping, video), auditory learners (pod cast tools), kinesthetic learners (note taking tools, collaboration). That gives it a nice angle. I don't know all tools in the list, but the list gives a good impression of useful tools.

Wanted: T-shaped students

I came accross an article on Fifth Academic Days Conference in Zurich some time ago, where academic leaders and business leaders met. It called for the creation of 'T-shaped' students. Before you imagine their physical appearance, let me tell you: it's just a metaphor of course. The industry is looking for people with broad general education (the horizonal line) as well as a profound and deep knowledge of a particular subject (the vertical line). I'd add to that the vertical line might actually shift to other fields during your career...

A quote:

Schools are doing this to create ‘T-shaped students’. The vertical part of
the T represents the traditional mathematics and science education of an
engineer and the crossbar is all the other qualities, so students don’t end up
deep but too narrow. Larry told the group, “at IBM we look for people who have a
depth in a particular field but that also possess much broader top end skills.
That’s what it takes for collaboration to occur.”

It's not the lack of manpower, but insufficient knowledge transfer.

Nice article on CLO Magazine on upcoming changes in workforce, I quote the first paragraph:

"According to Randstad USA’s just-released “2008 World of Work” survey,
U.S. businesses face a serious talent problem with the coming retirement of baby
boomers. Of course, this isn’t news to most chief learning officers. What they might not realize, though, is the challenge lies not with a
lack of manpower, but with insufficient knowledge transfer."

This means in my humble opinion the learning profession is called upon to make this transfer of expertise happen! The retiring generation has a lot of expertise in its head (knowledge), hands (skills) and heart (behavior), and somehow that has to be extracted, transformed into learning that works for the incoming generation and delivered to them asynchroneously.

The rest of the article is here: http://www.clomedia.com/executive-briefings/2008/June/2247/index.php

A global LMS costs 400.000 $ per year

In this month's Chief Learning Officer magazine, Josh Bersin mentions some numbers from a recent study on global Learning Management Systems (LMS):

- a global LMS costs on average 400.000 $ per year
- about half of that is for license fees
- 30% is for support
- most have LMS steering groups
- you might need up to 1 LMS FTE employee for every 1000 students