[best] So what's new?

As a trick forcing myself to keep up with my ever growing reader feeds, every month I pick out the blog post that provoked the most thought or provided the biggest insight for me.
For the past month of August, I'm nominating Clive Shepherd's article 'what low growth and high debt mean for l&d'. Clive analysis the economic context both in public spending and corporate growth in Europe, concludes this is not a temporary phenomenon surfacing in a moment of financial crisis, and links that to l&d : less courses, more peer etc.

Why this post? Because it is a reminder that nothing is new.
As blurry as the future might sometimes look, in the learning field we do have a pretty good idea where we're going. Everyone who followed the learning bloggers and their tweets over the last few years, anyone who attended conferences and saw the divide between 'the vendor booth' and 'the gurus and practitioners on stage' has a pretty good understanding of what lays ahead.

To illustrate this point: here are a few more articles of the past month that reinforce the directions we're going:

• Less is more: budget restrictions, public spending cuts and low growth lead to the predictions of less but better targeted learning. Clive's article illustrates this. 
• New kids on the school play ground : the effects of the public spending cuts coupled with parent's concerns on the quality of public education opens spaces for others to enter. One of the increasingly important group of kids on the play ground are publishers. See the post of Pierre Gorissen on the Dutch Squla initative, a similar one to Germany's Bertelsman-backed Scoyo. If you see the investments and positions that global publishers such as Pearson are taking, you can only wonder how long it will take before their scope and size will de facto set some of the school curricula. Other important players are the analytics software vendors to align the scarce education resources for optimal outcome. George Siemens uploaded an insightful analytics presentation on Slideshare.
• The content king has abdicated : a shift in attention away from heavy content as Jay Cross' article 'it's not about the content' illustrates and towards ...
• Power to the peers : in today's world, expect more and more peer learning and work surfacing and taking over the driver's seat from ye old hierarchy and authoritative figures. Peer recognition is part of the puzzle and illustrations of that trend this month include Bersin's post 'Badges swarm the internet' and Wilfred Rubens post on the open badge program. On a more general level, Jane's excellent article series on the smart worker lists 8 features of the empowered peers. Ignatia mentions Edupunk's DIY guide to credentials. 
• ... I'm sure you have a lot more for this list

Clive's article made me see that the future of l&d will not be a surprise. Over the years, we've gotten a pretty good view on it. The surprise will be how we'll get there. Get any flock of people together and you'll have some that go in direction A, some in B, and most staying where they are until they get a good reason to move. Often these good reasons come from external disrupting factors, eg a small crisis. To me, the surprise will be how fast and how this new world shapes, not how it'll look like.