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Going to add the entry soon. Putting placeholder here so I can provide the link to Vince for the news

This past weekend I met up with my family in Savannah. I was going to read up on the history of the area before going for inspiration but ran out of time before leaving Chicago. We did manage a private carriage ride around town, saw wonderful views of draped Spanish moss in each square, and had wonderful po boy meal at Huey's, but we otherwise failed to absorb the wealth of information that was available.

It has been a crazy month on the road soon to culminate at the NAB conference in Vegas. I left a half a foot of snow in Chicago for a weekend at Orlando and heading to Savannah now. After another 2 weeks in Chicago, I'll get a few hours in Baltimore before we head to Vegas. What fun.

One of the sessions I am giving at NAB next month is titled "Emerging Web 2.0 Technologies You Need to Know". As I work on the outline of my presentation, one of the primary facets of Web 2.0 comes to mind: collaboration. That is why I'm posting my rough outline here. I'm hoping to get some corrective criticism, to truly get the best list of technologies to showcase. We have turned on commenting below with this post.

Previously, I talked about an adaptive learning object, a software driven learning object that learned about a user's strengths and weaknesses and directed the user to different static learning objects based on their abilities. It would be like a switchboard that steered users to different sections based on their knowledge and understanding.

Now, let's push this idea a little further.

In November, I had the pleasure of installing the first release of our new Contact and Event Management System (CEMS) at Aramco Services in DC. It has personally been an incredible learning experience and has shown me just how exciting it is to be a web developer these days.

I had a epiphany last week and hacked up one of my webcams. I remember reading an article about a Microsoft head who was trying to capture his life as a series of audio, images, video and documents to create a digital memory. For the most part, he created a dogpile of data and found retrieval was the most difficult part. That is because he was trying to capture all that he could, but made retrieval a secondary priority.

I wondered, is there a way to use this sort of thing for learning purposes?

Learners have long been classified as auditory, visual, or kinesthetic. To a large degree, this is accurate. Learners will either learn best from what a teacher says, what audio visuals they provide, or the quality of the hands on experience. Then again, there are problems with this classification. Some people are unable to see or hear. Does this mean that they can only learn via touch and movement? And what role do smell and taste have in their learning experience?

As it stands now, most training is performed the same way, one person teaching a bunch of people in a certain place at a certain time. Whether it be a teacher in front of a class giving a lecture or a corporate trainer guiding a cohort through coursework, a single person transmitting knowledge to multiple users in one place at one time.

Such system is rife with limitations, temporal, spatial, and resource-based. You have to have the learners and instructors set aside time, create space for the learning, and, you have to create new materials.

Training takes time and effort. It takes resources. Lots of resources. And it produces nothing concrete. Nothing solid. Nothing with a clearly defined value.

So, why bother training employees? Why not just drop people into a job and have them figure it out? Why does an employer need the resource drain of training when it would be just easier to let people figure it out on their own? It seems to be a far more streamlined option than some convoluted training program being tacked onto the business of business.