Conversations do matter

I am still quite brain dead from the the eLearning Guild event. Dead and yet quite alive. More committed to the power of blogging than ever. It was amazing to pick up conversations with people I had never met -- to continue right where we had never actually started -- to weave more threads together. To put real personalities and faces and human warmth on top of all these words I have been reading.

So now I'm sold on the values of social networking tools and Web 2.0. Completely. And I may start proselytizing. The last session on Friday I sat in on was "It's not innovative if it doesn't educate." It was Web 2.0 for beginners. And I realized that I'm no longer a beginner. I didn't learn anything new about the technologies or even how they are being used. But what I did learn is how much other people still don't know about this stuff. To the two women I was sitting next to, I was an expert. "You blog?!" "What's a wiki?" Neither of them had ever touched either thing. Not even wikipedia.

I was shocked. And yet not shocked at all. It confirmed what I have been thinking: that most of the e-Learning and training world out there is still doing the same old same old. Some folks don't want to change. Some folks don't know that they will have to change. Some are starting to have an inkling. And some folks probably won't have to change at all -- the old order is fine and this may not solve a problem. There is room for everything.

I had so much to share with these women in just a few minutes and I think they walked away really seeing the potential in these tools for their organizations. They were excited.

An so am I.

Thanks to all of you that I had a chance to continue conversations begun online. It was awesome!