Learning 2006, two days after

A blessing in disguise: My laptop had 4% battery left when I arrived at Orlando airport to come home on Wednesday. No reason to lug it around. It went into my suitcase and rode home in the belly of the plane. Consequently, instead of writing a description of the last two days on the way back, I read a few more chapters of From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism, inadvertantly giving myself more time for reflection.

An engaging event like Learning 2006 gets my mind racing. I come up with new ah-ha’s days later, as my brain makes new connections while I sleep. The process is still going on, but I’ll post some observations now and continue in a future post.

Dennis Dammerman, long-time CFO and vice chairman of GE who sat in the office next to Jack, told the group he never spent a minute measuring ROI. “When you saw what training can do, you realized that the return was infinite.” A burden of leadership is to see things first-hand.

Great. Read that again. No ROI. In each of my sessions on informal learning, I’d lapsed into improv of how top executives make key decisions. The train of thought goes like this: “Boy, they want $2 million for something called an LMS. I wonder if my pals are at the golf course yet. Billy has a runny nose. Damned Sarbanes-Oxley crap; the old days were so much more fun. LMS? Charlie usually squeezes our vendors good, so the price is probably right. I’m trying to remember what they need this thing for. I need another coffee….” After half an hour of this churn, the exec signs off on the project because intuition tells her it’s the wise thing to do.

Latest euphemism for oldsters: silver workers. * Marriott has a director of Enthusiastic Learning. * There’s a microphone available for the iPod; the Apple guy next to me was recording Elliott’s presentations. * 42% of the 1800 people at Learning 2006 are members of Elliott’s 244-company Learning Consortium. * Instead of a call report for all to borrow from, Elliott referred us to the event wiki. * Photos of the event are starting to show up on Flickr.

Learning Links is a wiki for suggesting, exploring, rating, and reviewing links to sites on topics such as Authoring Resources, Collaboration, or Mobile Learning. Our industry needs a peer-rated list of sources like this. This needs more oomph to be the enduring place.

Whoops. I’m supposed to be at the Web2.2 conference in twenty minutes — and it’s forty-five minutes away. I’ll pick up on this thread later….