ASTD TechKnowledge 2007 - Opening Sessions

I’m at the opening session at ASTD TechKnowledge (http://tk07.astd.org). I’ll soon be doing a session on Blogging and Social Bookmarking for Personal and Group Learning.

Tony Bingham, President of ASTD, is doing his introduction, and his content is: Web 2.0, personal learning, easy distribution of software (software as a service), video is here now, push to pull, teaching Gen Y (what he calls the netGeneration). What a great setup for my presentation. Thanks Tony. And, it’s somewhat surprising to see a relatively slow moving organization, ASTD, driving this discussion.

One thing that struck me was his point of relevant vs. perfect. He was part of the team that worked on Britannica Online. He openly questions whether the goal of perfection (think as compared to Wikipedia) should be the primary. To me this relates closely to the question of speed vs. quality.

Thorton May is now up. He has verbal ADD. He only gets half way through a sentence and stammers a few words and then starts the next. A couple of major points: The number one skill set of the future is the ability to learn. Everyone needs to go back to school (interesting that he assumes that going back to school will help).