Content-type: text/html Downes.ca ~ Stephen's Web ~ Why I’m Paying For an Online Newspaper

Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community
Elliott Masie recycles an article from his newsletter last June in this month's IT Training magazine. Apparently he did not like my response because he never wrote back or even acknowledged its receipt (I hate that!).

CRLFThe gist of my response was this: "It's one thing to talk about our being used to paying for printed newspapers, and to talk about it only being fair to compensate editors and writers for plying their craft, but in fact with virtually free global syndication, the substantially reduced cost of publication, and an increasing capacity on the part of the public to speak for itself, such productions and such professionals are not needed in nearly the quantity they were formerly. When we look at what is possible with new media and internet technology, it makes less and less sense to be paying print era prices for online reproductions of industrial age products."

CRLFThis is the basis behind the current crisis in e-learning. The industrialists - as I characterize those who are pushing the enterprise LCMS solution - and pursuing a lock and key approach to e-learning, pricing it out of the range of all but the large corporations. But now we have hit the crisis point of that strategy. It can't continue, and the reverberations are being felt across the internet.

CRLFMaybe what it tok was the firing of a reporter and the folding of a magazine to bring this all to a head (see below)...

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
stephen@downes.ca

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