Regular Blogging...?

OK, so it's been about 4 months since I set this blog up and I'm only just getting around to writing my second post. I've been busy... and a little forgetful.
But today has been pretty momentous in that my youngest has started school, and (hopefully) started learning even more than what he has so far. His excitement at becoming a 'big boy' (no sniggering at the back please), in his school uniform which includes his "boring trousers", was obvious, and I'm glad to report that he started as he means to go on:-
By trying to climb the tree outside the assembly hall before we'd even been let into the school....

But this has really made me think again about the environment he's going to be learning in. My daughter's at the same school and has just started year 3, and I still remember the amazement I felt on first going into her reception year classroom. There was a large smartboard, a ceiling projector and a couple of PCs in every room. I'm not sure what I had expected to find, but seeing as the last time I'd been in a school classroom was a long while back, I wouldn't have been surprised to see a chalk-dust ridden blackboard.

But have either of my kids been surprised to see such technology? No, of course they haven't, in the same way that I wasn't surprised to see a dusty old blackboard and graffiti-etched desks on my first day at school back in the late 1800's.

So what does this have to do with what I set out to write about in my initial post - the state of e-learning in the corporate environment. Well there are several things which bug me and which I hope to address in subsequent posts. But one item that often recurs is an underlying attitude in relation to e-learning, often exhibited by L&D and IT towards users and learners - i.e. their customers. There sometimes seems to be an assumption that any new technology or new, interactive way of learning online simply won't be understood by the learners. They assume that the learner, when presented with such new-fangled ideas and tools will simply give up or break something or come running back to them, begging them to give them back their books and text-heavy 'traditional e-learning courses'.
I understand that there will sometimes be problems with the corporate infrastructure or with ongoing support for certain tech. But a lot of the time I feel that it's too easy not to move forward and try new things, using the excuse that too much support would be required by the users as they just wouldn't be able to cope.

I do feel that certain areas of an organisation can find it hard to get to grips with learning in new ways, whilst others just take it in their stride.

Using the example of my kids going into their new classrooms, I don't think it's the learners who struggle to adapt......