Small World

Had an interesting evening sitting around the house by myself while the family is enjoying the last few days of their summer vacation out at the lake. I was just web surfin' a bit when I got a little beep from someone sending me a message in Desire2Chat. This guy was reading my blog and wants to know if I'm available to talk for awhile. I say sure so he Skypes me and we spend about the next 55 minutes talking about lots of cool things.

He's just moved to an Asian country where he's taken a job with a company (I'm sworn to secrecy) that is developing a learning toolkit that is totally web-based. The concept revolves around informal learning and a no-geeks-required user interface that allows maximum creativity and flexibility with minimum structure/restrictions.

He showed me an online demo of the work-in-progress and I liked what I saw. The more we talked about this the more it struck me how all of this technology and all of these web/informal learning opportunities totally get around the Blackboard patented "inventions." I need to think about this some more but I am definitely going to blog about it more and hope to get some input from others about this concept.

So this guy in Asia is reading my blog written in Minnesota and two minutes later we're talking for free with microphones hooked up to our computers. The world is definitely getting smaller (flatter?).

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