"Money has become intangible; it's simply bits and bytes... it's not finished goods. Money has become the raw material. The real wealth of any organization lies between the ears of its people. We've arrived in an economy where it is thinking, knowledge, intellectual capital that tip the balance between success and failure."

Stewart Thomas, Author

The Future of the eLearning Forum – May 1, 2008

As founder and Chairman of the eLearning Forum (eLF), I am pleased to announce that eLF has agreed to become a part of the Human Capital Institute’s (HCI) Center for Human Capital Excellence effective May 1, 2008. HCI has offered eLF the infrastructure, support, and resources necessary for eLF to continue its leading edge work at the intersection of learning, innovation, and business, and the eLF Board has accepted this offer.

As a result of this agreement all current eLF members will be granted an HCI Professional Membership through December 2008 (a value of $175 to each member), and eLF will be re-branded as “The Learning Forum – A Professional Community of the HCI Center for Human Capital Excellence”. I and the eLF Board of Directors are certain that this “merger” of resources between the two organizations will bring new value to our members and to the learning and human capital management industries as a whole.

Founded in 1999 as the Silicon Valley eLearning Network, eLF has built a reputation as the thought leader in learning innovation and trends, with particular focus on best practices, for business performance. Our half-day meetings at SRI International, Cisco, Webex, HP, Oracle, Microsoft, Net Appliance and many other companies around Silicon Valley, as well as in online webinars and online community discussions, have introduced new concepts, and provided a popular discussion and networking forum in which members have explored and debated leading edge thinking in this field.

Now the time has come for the eLF to further evolve its mission and delivery model in order to better meet the needs of our members and to extend greater benefits to them. To drive this evolution, the eLF Board has been working over the past several months with HCI to architect a new model for our community – one that we think recognizes today’s changing business and organizational dynamics and the convergence of talent management and learning innovation.

I believe that many exciting opportunities will result from this agreement. In addition to granting HCI Professional Members to eLF Members, we will be launching a new series of live and web-based events, an enhanced resource and research repository, and a collaboration space, featuring blogs by learning and talent management thought leaders and a wiki devoted to Learning Architecture 2.0. The current eLF Board will join a newly constituted HCI Learning Forum Advisory Council, that will be co-chaired by myself, Del Langdon, eLF’s CEO, and Joe Pulichino, an eLF Board Member and Senior Vice President for HCI’s Center for Human Capital Excellence in San Francisco. Additional announcements will be appearing soon on both the eLF and HCI websites that will describe our upcoming programs in greater detail.

I am very pleased to see eLF start this new phase of its evolution and I look greatly forward to working with Del, Joe, the Advisory Council, and all of you to make this next phase an exciting learning journey for all of us.

Eilif Trondsen
Founder and Chairman, eLearning Forum


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