I've just spent 2 very interesting days here in Orlando at the 14th Sloan ALN conference. Fortunately, my keynote talk opened the conference, so I was able to enjoy today without the pressure of a big talk forthcoming. The conference is quite large (1200 registered) with mostly American postsecondary distance and blended learning faculty, designers and tech support types. My keynote Open Education resources & a Good Education System went quite well and the slides are posted on Slideshare

The conference has a fairly large vendor show and 605 students would be interested to see the number of e-learning companies with business plans revolving around providing e-learning services to colleges and universities. The seem to offer varying degrees of support from LMS, to strategic planning, marketing of courses, sales of courses, units, learning objects, videos and assessment systems. I chatted with folks from the Embanet company from Toronto, who now have most all their business in the US, providing a wide set of services including hosting 5 or 6 different LMS systems. I haven't seen much of this business in Canada, maybe because we don't have the proliferation of small-medium sized colleges and universities- or at least ones with the funds and interest in outsourcing components of thier e-learning business.

I attended a very interesting session on the "future of e-learning" and hard an interesting analogy of recreating education on an indiviudal service model much as medicine provided. One could hardly think of having patients wait until September and take a prescribed sequence of treatments (with prerequisites) even if they didn't need the treatment. This continues to provoke my interest in developing self-directed learning models, but that allow learners to connect with others (including teachers) when they need or desire collaboration, but that they remain in control of time, distance, pace and technology.

As always the face-to-face contact and the networking is great - even if it is ironical to sit on airplanes for hours, growing my carbon footprint, in order to talk about the joys of online learning.  Well, tonight I do a session via web conference celebrating Montreal's Concordia University's Ed Tech program 25th anniversary. But at least I'm not flying anywhere to participate and can jump in the outdoor pool afterwards to cool down!

Tomorrow, I am off to Brazil (via Chicago!) for a Canadian Brazil DE summit and then home a week today.