The promises of eLearning as a major growth sector of the New Economy are definitely dampened during the last few years, and the term "slow revolution" may be a more adequate characteristic of the process. In the research literature the number of articles and reports taken from higher education has grown at a fast rate, and it contrasts sharply with the few documented studies that are grounded in working life. If we look more closely at the later segment of the literature on ICT and learning there is also a striking imbalance in favour of learning management systems compared with more job-integrated technological platforms. In this paper I will present the results from an evaluation of a national research project, "Net and multi-mediabased learning in printing companies" (NEMLIG), that was designed as a multi- casuistic, developmental study involving a cross- disciplinary group of researchers from computer science, educational science, ethnology and psychology. Its "field" came to include other sectors than the initial ones in graphical and media industries, like a large engineering company, a subsidiary of the national railway and the largest union in Norway (municipal workers) as a non-industrial contrast case. The main objective was to establish a pedagogical platform for eLearning that should be both similar to traditional craftsmanship and different, since training resources were to be distributed in new ways. These views were most clearly articulated by the union partners in the project consortium. In the paper I describe the translation of ideas on work integrated and net based learning systems into the design of prototypes and their implementation in work organizations. A special attention is given to how devices for user participation are operationalised and adopted. These observations from the Norwegian industrial sector are then summarized or retold in several dilemmas of developing web based learning environments in a working life setting like the integration of learning systems in the work process, the commitment or indifference of workers to computer-supported cooperative learning, the contradiction between a community of past learners and a community of future learners, flexible learning and the boundaries of vocations and disciplines, dialogical tools and the visual communication of engineers and graphical workers - and finally two key questions: Firstly eLearning as a closed system or an innovator of organizational routines, and secondly user- participation and expert recipes in the developmental process. I relate these issues to the discussion of different paradigms of ICT and learning or the "turn" from instructional design to co-construction of learning environments. In the concluding discussion I also address recent contributions to the literature on "work based learning".