One proposed answer is to convince SME owners of the benefits of training and of e-learning. Benefits to their enterprises in terms of enhanced skills in the workforce and benefits of e-learning in terms of flexibility etc.

I remain unconvinced that this answer will work. Firstly for many SMEs I am unsure that there are - at least in the short term - benefits from enhanced skills in the workforce. Enhanced skills - without changes in production and work organisation may merely mean that employees become frustrated. Frequently SMEs lack the capacity to leverage benefits from those enhanced skills. And although production processes etc are changing rapidly, in many companies change is slower and more evolutionary.

I am convinced in the benefits of enhanced skills at an economic level and particularly for regions. Innovation tends to occur through networks and clusters - rather than at the level of the individual SME. I am also convinced of the benefits of enhanced skills for individuals - although the use of the English word "skills' is too narrow. I prefer to talk of competence and lifelong learning even though this term has been devalued by misuse.

Therefore I am much more interested in looking at learning than at training but this does pose some problems. Firstly, learning is far more individualised than training. Secondly - in an enterprise context - this requires building a culture of learning. But I am not so pessimistic about this. The work of the ICT and SME project has shown that whilst few small and medium enterprises are involved in e-learning, many employees are using everyday business applications - especially email and the web - for problem solving and networking. Neither they or their employees think of this as e-learning. This provides us with a valuable starting point. The question then is how to build on and structure that episodic learning.

Firstly, it means companies need to recognize the importance of informal or non formal learning (recognition does not imply accreditation). Secondly they need to consider the nature of the knowledge being deployed within their enterprise. In this respect I think it is worth revisiting research on work process knowledge. A third step would be to look at how ICt is being used in the company and how learning can be built around that ICT usage.

There were a number of projects represented at the Brussels seminar who are involved in developing e-learning for SMEs. However, they are almost all focused on training. Earlier this year, I wrote in a paper how e-learning - like any other new technology - tended to take on the paradigms of previous technologies. The motor car was first called a horseless carriage. Thus the preoccupation with the virtual classroom and the virtual university. But if the virtual classroom and university have tended to pervade the use of ICT in the education world then the training course has dominated ideas for the use of ICT in enterprises. Of course it can bring some benefits in terms of flexibility and access to training and there has been the development of some very good simulation software. But in general 'virtual training' has replicated previous paradigms of work place learning through participation in a course. The challenge is to transform training and this in my view means we have to start talking in terms of learning. There was a lot of attention paid to this proposed ' paradigm shift' some three or four years ago, driven by ideas around the learning organisation and lifelong learning, but the ideas never really went anywhere. For one thing it assumed once more that enterprises would be convinced of the benefits of developing a learning culture and secondly tended to assume that workers and bosses had the same interests at heart.

The potential of ICT offers a tool to reopen tis debate and develop real applications. We need new technology to allow learners to accumulate 'learning diaries - not just logging episodic learning but also encouraging and facilitating reflection on that learning. We also need clever systems which present access to learning materials and applications in the context of work and work tasks or problems and also, critically, allow progression to generalise and develop a deeper understanding of the implications of that learning. I would have thought such technologies are not impossible using distributed metadata and web services applications.

At the same time, such a system should develop enterprise level 'knowledge bases', bridging the present divide between learning technologies and knowledge management applications.

We also need to reconceptualise the divide between learning in the workplace and out of work. One idea that intrigues me would be the possibility of developing a learning diary application on a memory stick - that employees could plug in to their work computer and also use when surfing the net at home. There is an interesting article in the Guardian on this sort of technology.

OK that's all for now - I will return to this in future posts.