Good point Seb but in my experience it does not seem to help that much to remind enthusiasts (of the latest thing) that progress is slow - but relentless. A few of us are still functional who started the UK HE virtual campuses in the late 1990s - when many virtual high schools started too - and we know the game does not change that fast. I used at this point to refer to our (Sero's) reports on "organisational change" done for Becta which people seem instinctively to refuse to read - a bit like not buying a painting because the painter has died! I also used to point to the article I did (via some facilitation from Seb) with Sloan-C on "online education today" - http://www.sciencemag.org/content/323/5910/85.short - and then bemoan that it was not open access - but hey! it is almost so - see http://www.sciencemag.org/content/323/5910/85.full - register and read, folks! The US is awash with online learning in HE/FE. And has over 500 online virtual high schools. What IMHO is truly amazing is that despite the relentless prevalence of online learning in the US, nearly every day one can find an article in a "learned journal" from a US academic who has "discovered online learning" via MOOCs and seems unaware of any other kind. And there is a lot more online learning in the UK than most are aware of - and not only from HE. Check out http://virtualcampuses.eu/index.php/England#ICT_in_education_initiatives Paul Bacsich

No great ideas but check with pyschologists of reading - re analysing fingerprints, bent pages etc - and check out book clubs for key authors - zealous readers musk know a lot about their behaviour - and arts/humanities students glued to set texts (especially in US institutions)- and in UK, I see them regularly on the train - and marking up the books too To open your mind further check out Jasper Fforde! http://www.blipfoto.com/view.php?id=1003767 (recent tweet by an e-learning guru you know) P

Fascinating that you had a printout of what looks like a "cafe" screen on a computer conferencing system circa 1992 - the year that FirstClass was installed at the OU. It was said in OU FirstClass circles that Tone Hasemer (also now dead) was the inventor of the "cafe" concept (used certainly for XT001 and I seem to recall even earlier - http://earthconnected.net/papers/icde.htm) and thus in many ways of the "social networking" extension of pedagogy that the screen shows. Mind you, the benefits stated correlate with the hypotheses of Harasim, Cross etc prevalent in the later 1980s. All of which to me adds to the poignancy of the screen rather than detracts from it.

Robin is a great loss to the e-learning community and to many of us as individuals. In particular I am very grateful to her for her patience when we collaborated on the JANUS project at the OU in the 1990s: she succeeded in getting at least the basics of evaluation into my techno-managerial head - I trust that some has lasted to this day. I also celebrate the way she kindly but relentlessly propelled me towards research outputs not just EU deliverables.