Stephen Downes on what makes e-learning work

Some Principles of Effective E-Learning

A good summary. What Downes says here most of us already know intuitively. He paints the topic in three broad brush-strokes of interaction, usability and relevance, looking at Google and Yahoo! as models for on-demand informal learning.

I particularly like his comments about the social nature of "finding stuff out." As a Flash programmer I've gotten more useful information from the developer forums at Macromedia than from the documentation. The docs show the syntax of the language, the developers' worked examples show the context.

He errs (IMO) in assuming that learners always know what they need - often they don't know what they need or how to go about finding it. That's a big challenge.

This sentence, though, jumped out at me: "A resource, if it is well and clearly written, and focused on a clear topic, is its own metadata."

UPDATE:

Stephen immediately replied to my email:

Sorry about the discussion board; it has recently been rejecting everyone as a spammer.

I didn't mean to imply that users always know what they need. That is a reason why interaction is so critical. As Erin Brewer shows, what often happens is that there is a process of negotiation whereby the user interacts with a knowledgable person in order to determine what they need. See http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/website/view.cgi?dbs=Article&key=1094170319