Q & A with Stephen Downes

Stephen Downes is a Canadian eLearning specialist who works for the National Research Council. His personal Web site, www.downes.ca , contains a wealth of Web links and news. The site, which he has operated since 1995, had 2,845,258 hits in June. His popular RSS feed was hit about 40,000 times in the first three weeks of June. Stephen's email newsletter has 2,950 daily and weekly subscribers.

Lisa Neal, editor-in-chief of eLearn magazine, says “Certainly e-learning has been more prominent in the media recently, both through the increasingly common spam and banner ads announcing online programs and recent news items. There are currently well-publicized scandals where U.S. government workers earned higher salaries after acquiring higher degrees from so-called diploma mills... Will the impact of this publicity be to raise people's awareness of e-learning, even if the context is negative, or will it smear people's impressions of e-learning and decrease their acceptance?"

Not really. There are these cases, but what is less reported are the millions of people taking one or two online courses. These courses, usually free or very low cost, offer practical learning on a wide range of subjects. See, for example, this page. Additionally, there has been a huge uptake by traditional institutions. Almost all universities offer at least some online courses, about half offer an online program, 97 percent of schools have Internet access.

A third major area of growth has been in the corporate sector, with e-learning accounting for about fifteen percent of all corporate training. None of these are touched by diploma mills, and there is no reason to expect that diploma mills will impact on this continuing uptake. Learning modules have traditionally been linear, sequential and methodical. However, the Internet has shown us that people can learn in non-sequential ways-— browsing, random exploration, non-directed researching.

Has e-learning been changing to accommodate the new multi-tasking mind in the electronic age?

E-learning as a field is exploring every possible direction, with non-sequential learning being among these. That said, for the most part, you have to look outside the domain of traditional institutions. A lot of people, when they speak of e-learning, speak of the 15 percent of learning that is done as a part of a formal program. These have in the main continued in the traditional, linear, instructor-directed form. But the bulk of e-learning is already outside this domain and is advancing in a very unofficial manner.

In your book, you made an interesting observation: "What happens in cyberspace is not a transportation of the self, but an extension of the self: we do not 'go out' into cyberspace, but rather, we 'look out' or 'reach out' into cyberspace." In what ways can e-learning become more of an extension of ourselves in the future? Where is it going? (if you don't mind playing futurist for a moment)

E-learning is an extension of ourselves in the sense that it greatly increases our capacities. With appropriate incentive and a little bit of work, it is possible today to become well educated in just about any academic field (professions, of course, with a significant practical component, resist this trend). This means that the imbalance between the formally educated and the uneducated in a discipline has shifted.

What this means, for example, is that it is now possible for me to talk knowledgably about psychology with a psychologist, about operating systems with a computer programmer, about world affairs with a political strategist. Very often these conversations are with people actively engaged in the field — for example, I have regular correspondence about journalism with practicing journalists (as well as with school of journalism professors).

My disagreements about American policy are taken up with people working inside the U.S. foreign office. And so on — my experience here is by no means unique. This sort of global conversation — of which learning is a part, in that it gives me access to the background I need in order to converse in this way — is in the process of reshaping political and commercial realities.

It is important to recall how much of our culture - including political culture, economic culture, educational culture — has been shaped by 'gatekeepers', elites who, because of their knowledge and position, are the sole arbiters of what we will read, buy or learn. This gatekeeping function has already been disintermediated; new people — what Robin Good calls the 'newsmaster' are taking their place, and the result is a much more balanced exchange.

In education, the result is the gradual erosion of the power relationship that existed between student and professor. In some senses, we see this already by the designation by many of the student as 'customer' rather than, say, apprentice. But it's deeper than that, and we will see eventually the designation of student as 'colleague' — and in an important sense, it will not be possible to distinguish between student and professor online.

How can information designers and Web designers learn more about creating e-learning tools for their clients and employers?

By spending time on the Web. By visiting as many sites as they can, by seeking to learn something — be it Java, car care, rose planting, whatever — and trying different paths, different routes. By reading blogs. By visiting news sites. By participating in mailing lists. By getting their hands dirty creating web pages and writing database applications. There are formal courses, but they won't do the job. There is no other way, but to get inside the Web, and live it.

Are you working on any new books or projects you can tell us about?

I have partially completed a history of the Internet. I am working on something that will explain more fully what I mean when I talk about networks and the 'self organizing Web'.