Amara's Law - What do we want our MLEs to do?

Have just been reading an interesting piece on the NAACE website called "Do We Still Need e-Learning?" by Theo Kuechel. It questions what we mean by e-learning and what this might mean re. using learning platforms in the future. Here are a couple of quotes from the article to get you thinking:

"... it is very easy to dress up the old paradigms of learning in a VLE, call it e-learning and assume that it will be transformational just because we can mark, test and manage students online. I suspect that this is the aspect of VLEs that will be find favour with those in education who find it difficult to change their pedagogy to encompass the potential of the new technologies."

"The Internet itself is generating new technologies that are mutating so quickly research needs to be focused not on the tools but on how users interact and relate to that technology."

"Whilst researching for this short article, I conducted a Creative Commons search for images using e-learning as the keyword. This returned thousands of of images of people presenting to audiences; I saw 'suits', projectors and whiteboards, the colours were beige and muted except for white glare of the projected presentations. I repeated the exercise but this time without the e from the learning and the results were startlingly different, pictures of children, fun, engagement activity colours landscapes - indeed I found many inspirational images."

The term 'Amara's Law' comes from Roy Amara who was a past president of The Institute of The Future: that "we tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run." So over to you, what do you think about 'e-learning'? How do you think we should use Managed Learning Environments or learning platforms? How can we enhance pupils' interaction and relationships with fast-moving technologies?
June x