The Art of Knowledge

 

Timothious

I hate to admit that I am little intimidated by the presence of Tim. It's like you play for this baseball team and then this new big guy shows up and just hits bombs out of the park...but you know it's good beacuse he's helping your team and stuff...He is so much better at putting abstarct thoughts into words than I. I will try not to come off as some sort of quack, but I think in this realm I can hold my own. Now if we start talking about the existentialism of the Universe of anything that has to do with socail behavior, well then if Tim talks...I just listen and hope to learn...but it's nice to know I can hit a ping pong ball or two here.

I would also love to get more people on here...so if you read this and you are down I'll let you come on here and play if you want...just hit me up...I wish my dad didn't have tubes in his lungs...he would rule at this

But, yeah acronyms do suck but for some reason in technology/elearning they are necessary when doing research. I think I wrote that I hate when companies make up their own jargon just to impress people or weed out the underlings that may not understand everything. I hate them for that, but at the same time they are on the forefront of a lot of things that will have to be taken into consideration or incorporated to any project we undertake. So to understand them and speak their language, to me, seems rather vital.

Catalyst to me was a great place to work it was just so congested by small company problems and day to day stuff that it became some sort of a pressure cooker to get things done but at a slow pace, whether right or wrong. I think you and I made a lot of progress there from the first days I arrived when we did power point lessons for TWO days! But, I think the concept and group was great and the success of the company will be met in time and fulfilled by the people currently runing it...i'd love to hear Oliver's or Doug's take on it...but I assume Oliver will be rather politically correct in this reguard, like a smart lawyer would and Doug may have mixed views but may be more honest.

Anyway, yeah that's sort of what I want to do. Basically, there is one big huge human capital crisis out there and I don't think anybody really has the down to earth skills to solve it. Everything I am reading is all blooms taxonomy run off made into techno jargon. Like they just took a text book made it round, gave it some meta tags, through it into a computer, and said "oohh look it's now something called elearning". I don't really buy that. I sort of think that to teach people to learn you first must unteach them that they can't accomplish certain things, then teach them the propietary language (i think this is largely overlooked),then show them the tools and how to use them, then apply the same methodoligy of what works for that person over and over again to different arenas. Obvioulsy, for us to sort of work things out we have to work in what we currently know and understand in order to save time and explore the medium, which is technology, and coincenditally where the largest human capital issues seem to be. I like to think of the model as organic...when I think of what to build and I think organic it always puts me back on track from the big cold stuff I read from everyone else.

Basically the themes that I have worked out...and be patient with me here...since "elearning" has now become a big industry player is to first asess what the big boys are doing and then poke holes in it in order to help formulate the real answers...because I really don't think they have them...that's where I want to start...formulating theories and attempting to prove them or show that they are already attempting to be proven...that sounds futile but it isn't...not to me...if you aren't down with the grunt work...i'm always happy to do that and I have plowed through 10 white papers this week and plan on putting all my notes up...the good things about the players is that there aren't many and the ones that do exist...seem to be...well excuse me here Dr. Clark, a joke! The next step afetr research and having a solid overview of the market is to formulate a model based on the research. To sort of ssay, "Ok well that's cool but this makes sense." BUt that's a little way off...I think first it would be wonderful if you and I could just sort of hash out all the different ideas into some sort of common hypothesis that identifies, curriculum to be used, medium method, time of program, ideal incubating situation, wanted results, etc...

But, it's wondeful that you posted and in fact I don't really want you to do any grudge work unless you feel it thrills you, which I know it doesn't, I sort of love that you are that guy that just comes into the game and hits a homerun and we win. That's what you are great at, saying "whoa whoa...that's crap. This is better..." And then bringing new stuff to light. I also don't want to stifle or bore you by the lame stuff I have to do to really understand everything...I feel your holistic approach but know that this is really what I want to do...so to understand the industry is important to me...it's like if you sell hammers you want to know why the other guys hammer is cool too...because well we aren't rich guys so we can't just go start a company or call our Harvard buddies to give us a couple hundred grand you know...plus information is good...

I'll post more tomorrow after I get my notes straight...it's great to have you in here!
Link posted by JVMM : 1:18 AM