Stephen Downes’ whirlwind tour of Australia included Tasmania and his seminar in Hobart drew an audience of almost 100 people from the VET sector, Department of Education, University and IT industry.  Stephen had been asked to speak on “Positioning Tasmania as a leader in ICT-enabled education and training”, looking at

• the role of government
  (Stephen focussed on: vision, infrastructure, exemplar, networking)
• the role of industry
  (Stephen: rethinking business models, interacting with government and education, clustering and networking)
• the role of education (Stephen: education on the internet, centralised online learning, internet culture), and
• the way forward (this section provided lots of interesting links).

The talk was interspersed with questions from the audience, who had plenty to ask.

Stephen’s powerpoint slides of this seminar are available on his OLDaily (entry 4 October).  The slides include plenty of useful links to explore. 

Kirsty Sharp, a 2004 FLL has compiled a comprehensive summary on her FLL-ing blog (entry 4 October).  It gives a detailed account of the seminar. 

Stephen provided the Tasmanian e-learning community with plenty of practical information and also with insight into the future shape of e-learning.  He concluded with a vision for Tasmania, that of becoming a leader in what he called “the Tasmanian experience”.

I can say that Stephen Downes was an experience for me, and I know for many others also.  We appreciated Stephen’s generous sharing of his expertise and knowledge.