All Jock Tamson's Bairns

'All Jock Tamson's Bairns' was the strangest title yet for a conference on e-learning, and I must confess I never did find out what it meant. The conference was run by the eLearning Alliance, a non-profit group representing the e-learning community in Scotland, and was held in the very lovely city of Edinburgh. I spoke first, which was ideal, because it allowed me to sit back and enjoy listening to the other speakers.

Jenny Emby, formerly of Skillsoft but now retired, gave us a very interesting review of the current debate about the different characteristics of the various generations. What I liked was that she acknowledged people actually existed before the Baby Boomers - she called them the Silent Generation. These are the people responsible for starting up many of the major corporations and institutions now managed by the boomers, and they did this in a period that we would regard now as unbelievably austere and crisis-ridden. My parent's generation kept quiet and got on with things. They were loyal to their families, their employers and their countries, and assumed loyalty in return. When I consider my own easy life, with no wars to fight, no poverty to overcome, little in the way of manual labour to perform, and jobs relatively plentiful, it's easy to forget that these circumstances have been perhaps unique in history. My personality was shaped by the liberalism of the 1960s when we had never had it so good. Of course all these things are relative, and Gen Y would probably consider my upbringing to be unbelievably deprived. Who knows, changing economics may yet have an impact on the way Gen Y sees the world, and the shock may be hard to bear.

Kenny Henderson talked about the fine work they are doing with e-learning at BSkyB, the satellite TV company. BSkyB are de-emphasising the corporate LMS in favour of an all-purpose learning portal, making all manner of resources available freely to all their employees. What I also like is that BSkyB are allowing employees to rate any content on the portal, providing a Web 2.0 feel to the whole thing.

Graeme Duncan, from Caspian Learning, presented strong arguments for the use of simulations and games for training. Most importantly, from my perspective, he was able to show some excellent demos of asynchronous (single player) virtual worlds that Caspian had created for enterprises, educational publishers and public bodies,including the Ministry of Defence. On my table there was a general feeling of 'wow, I'd like some of that,' followed swiftly by 'but of course I wouldn't be able to afford it.' Even though Graeme made clear that you could do something for as little as $50K, there were people present for whom that represents their annual training budget. Clearly, 3D worlds are becoming more and more accessible, but the effort to create them is still likely to be restricted to large organisations and publishers serving large populations.

Judging by the turnout at the conference, there's a considerable amount of e-learning activity in Scotland, and the community is well served by the eLearning Alliance.