Due to work, I was sitting in a lay by on the motorway furiously collating usage stats for our 12 UniServity sites over a dodgy 3g connection instead of attending Epics elearning debate.

Now I did manage to get to the venue an hour later than planned, which meant I missed the majority of the debate, arriving to hear the last question from the audience and the final summaries from the speakers.

And to be honest, it was same old same old, the people for the motion that informal learning were about the bottom line, those against were not able to provide much if any real evidence, preferring the anecdotal and prosaic.

I’m actually glad I missed most of the debate, as i’m sure it would have just annoyed me more than anything else (and judging by some of the tweets about it, i’m not alone in that thought).

The problem is that, academics have very little evidence to prove their case because the technology is so new (workable mobile browsers have only been around for 4 years) and until they have measurable evidence they will always fail to convince the bottom liners.

I fear that we are entering the second decade of this millennium floating on the same rhetoric that has damaged elearning so much already.

I fear that without evidence, without proof that what we say is actually true, in this era of austerity we will not be able to find funding for more e-learning projects.

I fear for the future.