E-Learning "debate" 2009: Stephen Downes hits the nail on the head

I passed through Oxford between Bristol and London yesterday and attended a slightly pretentious debate organised by the elearning company Epic in the Oxford Union, a debating club run by the students of Oxford University that has has been graced in its time by world leaders and, more recently, by fascists and Nazi-holocaust deniers. (I make it sound as if I'd not have gone if I'd not been passing through: curiosity and the need to fly the ALT flag would have got the better of me.) The event served as a (probably effective) marketing and PR exercise for Epic - nothing wrong with that - but I do not think that it did much to advance participants' understanding; and the quality of some of the four pre-invited speeches on each side of the slightly silly, and heavily defeated, "This house believes that the e-learning of today is essential for the important skills of tomorrow" - was very variable, with Ufi's Kirstie Donnelly giving a particularly good account of herself.  Given his distance from the event, Stephen Downes makes some prescient observations.