Jay Cross' 2007 Personal Predictions

In his January 2007 "Letter from Silicon Valley" (as reported in Learning Light), Jay Cross offered these e-learning predictions for the 12 months ahead. Jay's predictions are quite fun and interesting - especially his "company news" items. Read on!

1. Work and learning will continue to converge. Nurturing learning ecosystems will supplant course-by-course instructional design.
2. Talent management, wikis, and intangible assets will cross the chasm into the mainstream. M-learning will not.
3. Workforce learning will become increasingly self-service, accessible as needed or requested.
4. Web architecture will cut into the Learning Management System market. The web's flexibility, lower total cost of ownership, and ease of use will reinforce this migration to the web.
5. Learning management, delivery, and reporting will be available on a buy-only-what-you-need hosted basis.
6. The outcry over sub-par, irrelevant training will lead to wide-spread adoption of quality ratings supplied by all learners.
7. Workers will develop an increasing amount of their learning content, just as the "read/write web" relies on users to provide solutions to problems.
8. The panic over losing the knowledge in the heads of departing baby boomers will subside.
9. In company news, Microsoft Vista will land with a thud. Many companies will adopt a wait-and-see attitude after massive security breeches come to light.
10. Microsoft will buy Yahoo! to try to make up for ground lost to Google. Wal*Mart, hungry to grow despite market saturation, will buy Amazon.com.