633 - Learn.com Bought by Taleo; Clay Shirky Keynotes Learning 2010

Learning TRENDS by Elliott Masie - Sept 1, 2010.
#633 - Updates on Learning, Business & Technology.
55,114 Readers - http://www.masie.com - The MASIE Center.
Host: Learning 2010 - Oct 24 to 27, Orlando, FL, USA.

1. Talent Company Buys Learn.com.
2. Clay Shirky, “Cognitive Surplus”, to Keynote

1. Talent Company Buys Learn.com: Today, Taleo, a major Talent Systems company, announced that it is acquiring Learn.com, a learning content and systems group. Learn.com was one of the first groups in the e-Learning field.  And, it is not surprising that we are seeing a merger of Talent and Learning capacities at this moment in history. Taleo will pay $125 million in cash for Learn.Com and will integrate their content and systems into their Suite. Watch for 1 or 2 IPOs in the near future, along with another Talent/Learning company merger. Details of the Learn.Com deal are available at http://www.learn.com

2. Clay Shirky, “Cognitive Surplus”, to Keynote Learning 2010! After reading “Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age” by Clay Shirky, I was intrigued. Here is a short summary:

“Since we Americans were suburbanized and educated by the postwar boom, we’ve had a surfeit of intellect, energy, and time-what Shirky calls a cognitive surplus. But this abundance had little impact on the common good because television consumed the lion’s share of it-and we consume TV passively, in isolation from one another. Now, for the first time, people are embracing new media that allow us to pool our efforts at vanishingly low cost. The results of this aggregated effort range from mind expanding-reference tools like Wikipedia-to lifesaving-such as Ushahidi.com, which has allowed Kenyans to sidestep government censorship and report on acts of violence in real time.

Shirky argues persuasively that this cognitive surplus - rather than being some strange new departure from normal behavior - actually returns our society to forms of collaboration that were natural to us up through the early twentieth century. He also charts the vast effects that our cognitive surplus - aided by new technologies - will have on twenty-first-century society, and how we can best exploit those effects. Shirky envisions an era of lower creative quality on average but greater innovation, an increase in transparency in all areas of society, and a dramatic rise in productivity that will transform our civilization.”

Then, I watched his recent TED presentation (http://tinyurl.com/2exugvf) and was convinced that I wanted to have Clay Shirky at Learning 2010. The problem was that he is a Visiting Fellow at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and will be teaching. But, why should that stop us? So, we have arranged to interview him via Live High Def Telepresence to explore the impact of Cognitive Surplus on the world of Learning.

Details at: http://www.learning2010.com/shirky 

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Yours in learning,
Elliott Masie
email: emasie@masie.com

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