Presentations

Collaboration Supercharges Performance, ASTD International. Macromedia Breeze. Covers blogs, RSS, information overload, complexity, time acceleration, network models, value of collaboration, Emergent Learning Forum, social network software, and more. Vision for Emergent Learning Forum, Macromedia Breeze, 15 minutes. Trends in Collaborative Learning (Macromedia Breeze) Keynote presentation for Collaborative Learning '04 Implementing eLearning, (Webex) Presentation by Lance Dublin & Jay Cross, October 8, 2003. More than 350 people attended the live presentation. Writing the Next Chapter of eLearning (Macromedia Breeze) slides from Interwise webinar with Boston eLearning Association, July 2003. No sound. Recording of event from Interwise. You'll need the Interwise Player. Blogs (Macromedia Breeze) very short, from Interwise webinar with Boston eLearning Association, July 2003 A Pocketful of Memes (Macromedia Breeze) Jay's Keynote at I-KNOW 03 in Graz, Austria. July 2003 Silicon Valley, The DNA of a Community of Practice (Macromedia Breeze) Jay's presentation to a group of Canadian eLearning Entrepreneurs, April 2003 Envisioning eLearning (streaming, Impatica) Jay's presentation at Online Educa in Berlin, November 2002 Some Difficulties with ROI (streaming, Impatica) Jay's presentation at Online Educa in Berlin, November 2002 Implementing eLearning (Windows Media streaming video) Jay and Lance's presentation at TechLearn 2002, November 2002 The State of eLearning (streaming, Impatica) Jay's lecture at SF State University, October 2002. eLearning is not Important (streaming, Icohere) Jay's presentation for Collaborative Learning 2002, November 2002.

Feel free to download or quote these so long as you credit internettime.com as your source. I speak frequently to groups of every size and composition on every topic you find in my blog and some you won't. I'd be happy to come speak to your group, meeting, or conference. I'm quite comfortable giving one-hour keynote style speeches, conducting panels, or moderating group discussions. I'll entertain discounts and fee waivers for non-profits, educational groups, community groups, or conferences with significant exposure.

Metrics & ROI

Four years ago I attended a how-to-ROI presentation at a major eLearning event and found it so misleading that I began writing about how companies really evaluate project potential and after-the-fact results.

Recently I've noticed ROI Workshops popping up. Spend a couple of days and the better part of a thousand dollars. Get a certificate. Such a deal. Unfortunately, neither the workshops nor the conference presentations cover the things I deem important:

• Metrics are in the eye of the beholder. They are not simply the application of a rote formula or accounting rule. They are subject to interpretation. This is what makes them worthy of discussion.
• The internal customer for metrics is your sponsor, also known as the person who pays the bills. When you talk with an executive, you need to talk about execution, not training.
• The only valid metrics for corporate learning are business metrics. To converse in business terms, it helps to be fluent with the concepts of trade-offs, risk assessment, expected value, focusing on core, changing perspective, the 80/20 rule, and the bottom line.
• Business goals. Strategic initiatives. Quarterly objectives. New product introductions. Figure out what matters in your organization. Then show the connection between what you do and what matters. It will make you an insider instead of an outcast.
• Kirkpatrick's four levels are a history lesson, not a guide to action. Imagine telling your sales manager that the sales force was well prepared ("Levels 1 & 2") but simply hadn't sold anything ("Levels 3 & 4"). Good luck in your next job.
• Most of a company's value resides in the know-how and relationships of its people. Traditional accounting assigns these intangibles a value of zero. Hence, traditional ROI has little credibility with enlightened executives.

Rather than update my various white papers and articles, I have consolidated my thoughts into a single one hundred-page eBook called Metrics. Check it out.

Power Shift

eLearning infrastructure decisions are climbing up the corporate ladder. A few years ago, eLearning was pigeonholed as a cheaper, faster way to train employees. By default, eLearning decisions fell to the director of training or HR.

Now, functional managers are using eLearning to meet business objectives. Managers look beyond employees to customers, suppliers, and distribution channels -- everyone benefits from seeding eLearning throughout the value chain. This is where we are now, with eLearning decisions seesawing back and forth between can-do functional managers anxious to get on with it, and CIOs/CLOs who want to go the next step to enterprise solutions. Still rare but perhaps the next step in this evolution is the CEO who looks at eLearning as a competitive weapon, the way to create a nimble organization, improve customer service, move quickly, and stay ahead of the pack.

ROI

January 10, 2003. Those of you who've read my thoughts on ROI know that I believe cost/benefit analysis is manditory and most ROI calculations are utterly worthless. Thus, I was delighted to come upon Enough Already! Getting Off the ROI Bandwagon by Kevin Kruse (mistakenly identified as Kevin Kenexa) in the current issue of Chief Learning Officer magazine.

Kevin writes that:

First came the articles, then the books, and now I see that an entire conference is devoted to the ROI of training. Obviously we're seeing a backlash against the orgy of IT spending of the late 1990s, and against e-learning initiatives that fell short of expectations. Personally, I think it's all hype, and I've had enough.

First, many senior executives don't care about ROI. In Jack Welch's book, "Straight From the Gut," he tells of his decision to invest millions in GE's new Crotonville training facility, even while undertaking massive layoffs. He didn't have an ROI spreadsheet to tell him training was a good investment; he just knew that investing in talent was critical to GE's future.

Second, ROI is an imperfect science that often involves making educated guesses at potential savings and gains. Senior executives know this, and they also know that there are many variables that can't be captured by a formula.

Third, ROI guesstimates are often a cop-out for tougher measurements of results. How about measuring employee engagement scores before and after management training, or doing pilot studies of sales training programs that measure closing ratios and time-to-close?

Systems Changes

Traditional ROI has suckered corporations into evaluating learning initiatives on a project-by-project basis, and this has lead to supporting each new approach as if it existed in isolation. The Meta-Learning Lab is developing ways to improve the overall learning process.

Take the old cliché of "Give a man to fish and he won't be hungry today. Teach a man to fish and he will never be hungry again." (Excuse the sexism; this dates back several thousand years.) The Meta-Learning Lab's goal is to teach fishermen how to improve their catch.

Scientific rigor: The Baloney Detection Kit

How to draw boundaries between science and pseudoscience, or between useful metrics and pure hype. From Scientific American

1. How reliable is the source of the claim?
2. Does this source often make similar claims?
3. Have the claims been verified by another source?
4. How does the claim fit with what we know about how the world works?
5. Has anyone gone out of the way to disprove the claim, or has only supportive evidence been sought?

6. Does the preponderance of evidence point to the claimant's conclusion or to a different one?
7. Is the claimant employing the accepted rules of reason and tools of research, or have these been abandoned in favor of others that lead to the desired conclusion?
8. Is the claimant providing an explanation for the observed phenomena or merely denying the existing explanation?
9. If the claimant proffers a new explanation, does it account for as many phenomena as the old explanation did?
10. Do the claimant's personal beliefs and biases drive the conclusions, or vice versa?

"Clearly, there are no foolproof methods of detecting baloney or drawing the boundary between science and pseudoscience. Yet there is a solution: science deals in fuzzy fractions of certainties and uncertainties, where evolution and big bang cosmology may be assigned a 0.9 probability of being true, and creationism and UFOs a 0.1 probability of being true. In between are borderland claims: we might assign superstring theory a 0.7 and cryonics a 0.2. In all cases, we remain open-minded and flexible, willing to reconsider our assessments as new evidence arises. This is, undeniably, what makes science so fleeting and frustrating to many people; it is, at the same time, what makes science the most glorious product of the human mind."

Corporate Learning Strategies by Dan Tobin. "If you start and end all of your learning efforts by focusing on your organization's goals, you will never be asked to do an ROI analysis to justify your budget."

There's no cookbook approach to measuring the ROI of training. Fred Nichols is so right about this.
Because the definition and perception of value varies from person to person, so do the purposes of evaluation. Moreover, the various audiences for evaluation frequently act as their own evaluators. If you look carefully about you, or if you reflect upon your own experiences as a "trainee," you will quickly discover that training is being evaluated every day, but by trainees, managers, and executives -- and in accordance with their criteria and purposes.

Payback

Technology-enabled learning creates value by speeding things up. Business-school professors compare making big corporate changes to turning around the Queen Mary. Turn the rudder and in a few miles, the ship changes course. These days, organizations that lack the agility to turn on a dime can only go about as far as the Queen Mary (which is moored in cement alongside a pier in Long Beach, California.)

A Fortune 50 company used eLearning, knowledge management, and collaboration to bring new-hire sales people up to speed in six months instead of fifteen. Nine months x 1400 new hires/year x $5 million quota = $5 billion incremental revenue. To be sure, better products, sales campaigns, and a host of factors contributed to the gain but a tiny faction of $5 billion still yields a significant ROI. (Here are the details: New-hire training at Sun Microsystems.)

Ten thousand consultants at a Fortune 100 technical services company earned professional certifications via eLearning. The result? Less attrition, better esprit de corps, and $100 million revenue/year attributable to higher billing rates.

A software firm launches a new system into a $250 million global market with eLearning and virtual meetings. This accelerates time-to-market by two months, gives them first-mover advantage over a major competitor, builds a more confident and enthusiastic sales force, and gets the channel up to speed at the same time as the direct sales force. Gain? $80 to $100 million incremental revenue.

A very large retailer of personal computers realizes that customers are frustrated with their products because they don?t understand the software that accompanies them. The company offers customers free admission to an online learning community created by SmartForce. More than 100,000 customers sign up to learn Windows, Word, and Office apps online. Value of increased customer loyalty? Conservatively, $20 million in repeat business over three years.

Often an e-Learning initiative pays for itself right off the bat by eliminating travel and facility costs, but that misses the point, because in comparison, upside gains dwarf cost savings.

The eLearning Emperor Has No Clothes

Go to any major conference for trainers and you'll find many sessions on evaluating results and measuring performance. If you're a line manager with no training background, you will at first be confused when participants make statements like, "We evaluate 100% at Level 1, 80% and Level 2, and 40% at Level 3. We're going to shoot for some Level 4 next year."

The "levels" come from a taxonomy developed by a budding academic, Donald Kirkpatrick, as his Pd. D. thesis more than forty years ago. Level 1 evaluates trainee reaction (generally via evaluation forms derisively known as "smile sheets.") Level 2 checks retention (can they pass the test?) Level 3 looks at whether theydo what they were trained for. Level 4 is whether the learning creates meaningful results for the organization.

Picture this. A national sales manager is reviewing quarterly sales performance with his boss. He tells her the new sales trainees scored 95% on Level 1, 82% on Level 2, and 9% on Level 3. Unfortunately, Level 4 improvement was infinitesimal. So the sales force loved the sales training, the majority passed the test, and nearly four out of five could demonstrate great sales behavior in a role-play. The only trouble is Levels 3 & 4: they aren't selling. How long would the sales manager keep her job? In business, Level 4 is, in fact, the only thing that matters. No wonder senior managers question the value of training.

The only valid measure of training is business metrics, not training metrics.

As the Godfather said, "This is business." If you can't see a benefit, don't do it.

Jack Zigon's list of performance measurement sites

Excerpt from Ed Trolley's Running Training Like a Business

Evaluating e-Learning by Dorman Woodall

Jay's notes on making the business case, new ROI challenges

The trouble with the "four levels" is that they falter when they go outside of the limited context of training. What happens outside the box is what counts inside the box. See Measuring Training ROI & Impact (1999). You can guess how I see this.

The Evolution of Management Accounting by Robert S. Kaplan

BNH on ROI. Their software models simlify complex ROI calculations.

Discussion group: ROInet

The Business Case website

The Fallacy of ROI Calculations

Measuring the Success of Training

Baruch Lev

Measuring the ROI of Training, CIO

Economic Value Added (EVA)

Learning at home

Training magazine, the March 2000 issue: Train on your own time, not "during work."

Sure, moving training from the classroom to the Web can mean reduced travel costs, less learning time away from the job, and certainly lower delivery costs. But most corporate training doesn't require travel, says Paul Reali, president of CyberSkills Computer Training Centers in Winston Salem, NC. And, he points out, no valid study has yet shown that online delivery significantly reduces learning time - actual time spent mastering a skill or acquiring knowledge-compared with instructor-led training of similar quality.

"No one wants to tell you that the 'anytime' of online learning is supposed to be after work and that the 'anyplace' is at home," he says.

Another reason: Despite yellow crime-scene tape barriers and "do not disturb" signs, the cubicle is a tough place to have a quality learning experience. And it's almost impossible to reserve the necessary time and concentration without broad organizational support--and the backing of trainees' immediate managers for regular learning time-outs.

Glossary

ADL. Advanced Distributed Learning, an initiative originally established by the U.S. Department of Defense and now a collaboration between government, industry, and academia. The purpose of the ADL is to ensure access to high-quality education and training materials that can be tailored to individual learner needs and made available whenever and wherever they are required. The ADL maintains a set of guidelines under the acronym SCORM to accomplish their purpose.

AICC. Aviation Industry CBT Committee. The granddaddy of standards bodies. Originally formered to set guidelines for the aviation industry, AICC concepts are the foundation for subsequent work by ADL, IMS, and others.

Andragogy. Word coined by Malcolm Knowles to describe how adults learn -- which is different from how children learn ("pedagogy"). I'm beginning to suspect pedagogy denigrates children and that andra is the gogy to go with for all. Main points are:

1. What's in it for me?
2. Let me decide how I'll learn it.
3. Where does this fit in relation to the other stuff I know?
4. Sell me on learning this.
5. Remove the obstacles from my path, please.

Asynchronous. [pretentious] Any time you like, e.g. watching a rerun on your VCR.

Bandwidth is a description of how much information can squeeze through a data pipe. Your intranet has high bandwidth; your dial-up connection is low bandwidth. Also used anthropomorphically, e.g. "He has low bandwidth" is equivalent to "He is a taco short of a combo plate" or "Her elevator doesn't go all the way to the top."

Bipolar thinking. The tendency to see everything in black and white when faced with shades of gray.

Blended. Current rage in eLearning circles. Means using more than one learning medium, generally adding an instructor component to web-based training. Duh! Blended is only a revelation for people who had been trying to do everything with just one tool – the computer. Classroom teachers having been blending various means of learning – lecture, discussion, practice, reading, projects, and writing, for example -- for eons.

Blog. An easily updated personal website, generally updated daily and expressing. See About Blogs or look at a sample.

Blog digest, blogathy, blogerati, blogger bash, blogger ecosystem, bloggeral, blogoverse, blogistan, blognoscenti, blogapottamus, blogorrhea, blogosphere, blogroach, blogroll, blogspot, blogstipation, blogule, blurker. See Blog Vocabulary.

Boiling the ocean. Trying to cure all problems at once, often with a single tool.

Broadband. Unscientific term for sufficient bandwidth to receive streaming video and sound. Usually refers to bandwidth equal to or greater than DSL or Cable Modem speed.

Career Limiting Move. It refers to any incident that puts a roadblock in your career path. "Jack spilled coffee on the boss. It was a major CLM."

Certification. Pass the test, get a certificate. This started with technical subjects, e.g. Certified Novell Engineer and Microsoft Certified Professionals. Cisco offers a progression of certificates that reminds one of the ranks in Boy Scouts. Since there's no authority legitimizing the certifications, expect a continuing proliferation of these things. Certifications simplify hiring decisions; on the downside, they encourage "studying to the test." For $500, I can get you an Certified Internet Time Professional ranking.

Chat. Real-time communication, text or voice. Generally, messages disappear when the session's over. Otherwise, you're probably having a discussion.

c-learning. Classroom learning. Used to be just "learning," but now we need to differentiate c-learning from eLearning.

Collaborative filtering. Example: Amazon tells me that other people who like the books I like are buying a particular book.

Community. A group of people united by a common purpose who share information and knowledge with one another.

Community of Practice. An informal group that shares values, perspectives, and ways of doing things. The motivation to learn is the deisre to participate in a "community of practice."

Complexity. It's a nonlinear, interconnected world and you will never figure it out. Shit happens.

Content. What's being learned, information. If it doesn't cause change, it's not information. The challenge is how to get the right content to right person, at the right time. This involves media choice (e.g., paper versus on-screen), speed, delivery cost, relevance, learner motivation, and other factors.

Context. The environment of content. Who's talking? When? Why? Content and context are like inside and outside: you can't have one without the other.

Content management system (CMS). A CMS supports the creation, management, distribution, publishing, and discovery of content from cradle to grave. A CMS helps users find what they're looking for. It also separates content from presentation. See StepTwo Designs.

Course. Rigid unit of learning, generally expressed in days and 'led' by an instructor. Opposite: 'Just enough.'

Dead-tree media. Paper-based publications.

Dynamic information. 'Real time.' Current, up to the second. Instead of reading pages prepared in advance, the pages are assembled on the fly, incorporating current information and taking into account current needs.

eLearning. Also e-Learning. Best practices for learning in the new economy, implying but not requiring benefits of networking and computers such as anywhere/anytime delivery, learning objects, and personalization. Learning on Internet time. Often includes ILT.

Explicit knowledge. Knowledge that's easy to communicate. (Opposite of "tacit knowledge.")

Gap analysis. Figure out what to do by assessing the gap between where you are and where you want to be. Most people then begin building from the present into the future. We favor looking at the step right before the ultimate one and backing toward the present one step at a time.

Hitnosis. Obsessively checking your web counter to see if the number has changed.

ILT. Instructor-led training, generally a workshop.

IMS - A standards body developing and promoting open specifications for facilitating online distributed learning. Its traditional emphasis surrounded meta-tagging specifications

Informal/formal learning. Formal learning is a class, a seminar, a self-study course -- everyone recognizes it as learning. Informal learning is over the water cooler, at the poker game, asking the guy in the next cube to help out, collaborative problem solving, watching an expert, or sharing a terminal for eLearning. More than half of corporate learning is the informal kind.

Instructional design. A systems approach to designing a learning experience. Heavily promoted by DoD investment, formal instructional design is currently under attack for fostering slow development, a printed-paper mindset, and insufficient attention to informal learning.

Internet time. The accelerated timeframe of the new economy brought on by eBusiness and the Internet. A year of Internet time may equal seven years of calendar time. Or more. Or less.

Intangible. Something that cannot be perceived by the senses. Accountants and financial types only grudgingly concede that some intangibles have value, and they find it in things like brand names and patents. Because you can't immediately sense a person's capability, a customer's loyalty, or a relationship with a supplier, accountants say these things have to value.

Job aid. Cheat sheet. Checklist. Process map. Generally, a piece of paper that helps you do your job.

Just-in-time learning. Getting the right knowledge to the right person at the right time.

K Log. Knowledge blog. A euphemism used by corporate types who don't want to be typecast as mere social bloggers.

Kittyblogger. A person who uses their blog to write about their cats or equally interesting topics.

Knowledge Management (KM). Whatever you want it to mean.

Learner-centric. Organize things for the good of the learner, not the instructor and not the institution. The core tenet of eLearning.

Learning. To gain knowledge or information of; to ascertain by inquiry, study, or investigation; to acquire understanding of, or skill; as, to learn the way; to learn a lesson; to learn dancing; to learn to skate; to learn the violin; to learn the truth about something.

LMS or Learning management system. eLearning infrastructure. At the simplest level, a tracking system. LMS's range from simple course-by-course registration systems to humongous, real-time databases that deal with personalization, learning prescriptions, job competencies, and parsing learning objects.

LCMS. Learning content management system. An LCMS is a multi-user environment where learning developers can create, store, reuse, manage, and deliver digital learning content from a central object repository.

Learning object. A machine-addressible "chunk" of learning. When labeled with metadata, an eLearning system can mix and match learning objects to create individualized learning experiences. Controversy swirls around the question, "How large is a chunk?" A course is too large -- that's yesterday's object. A couple of sentences is too small -- you would lose the context that provides meaning. Think five or ten minutes.

Learning service provider. Delivers eLearning - including learning management -- over the Internet. A learning ASP. Focus in-house IT on core processes; outsource eLearning to an LSP.

LOMBARD. Lots Of Money But A Real Dickhead. Coined by The Economist. Sometimes applied to vulture capitalists.

Low-hanging fruit: In an apple orchard, it’s the apples on the low branches. In business, it’s the easy sales to get. Problem: You run out of low-hanging fruit long before you become profitable.

Megasite. On the Web, a destination site that links to other worthy sources of information.

Meme. A self-replicating idea that propogates through people and networks, much like comptuer viruses. A thought-gene. Coined by Richard Dawkins.

Metadata. Information about information. Often, "metatags" that describe what's inside a chunk of learning. Generally machine-readable. Analogous to a barcode on an incoming shipment.

Meta-Learning. The process of learning. Learning to learn is a major component. See Meta-Learning Lab.

Meta-tags - Descriptive labels applied to media assets, pages, information objects and/or learning objects that describe the object so it can be managed more effectively. Machine-readable.

M-learning. Mobile learning. Learning delivered or augmented by an untethered device, for example by cell phone, WiFi PDA, wearable with headmounted display, or wireless tablet.

Moblog. Combination of "mobile" with "blog," moblogs are websites where people can post pictures taken with mobile phones in real time.

Nurnburg funnel. Source of the metaphor of training being akin to pouring knowledge into a person's head.

Ontology. The capstone of the Semantic Web. XML describes what the data is. RDF explains what the XML tag means in our context. An Ontology describes how all the pieces fit together.

Paradigm drag. When old thinking holds back new. From David Gelernter's Machine Beauty: Elegance and the Heart of Technology.

Peer to peer. When the PC is both client and server, able to swap resources directly with other PCs. Resources? Files, songs, videos, processor cycles, disk space. This wil be big for self-organizing teams.

Performance. The goal of learning. AKA productivity, results. It's relative to context. Decide what constitutes performance, then design the learning to support it.

Performance support. Learning imbedded in work. Microsoft's talking paperclip and 'Wizards' that guide users through applications are examples.

Permalink. A permanent marker or reference point to a certain document on the world wide web. Most commonly used for weblogs, news sites and newspapers. A permalink is denoted through the use of a symbol (pound sign, arrow, dot), date of content creation, the word permalink or image.

Personalization. Learning opportunities tailored to the learner's background, style, previous knowledge, etc. 'Mass customization' and '1:1 marketing' applied to learning. Results are saved time, accelerated learning, more wheat/less chaff, phenomenal performance gain.

Portal. 1. Synonyn for entry screen. Widely hyped 1998-1999 because anyone can imagine the utility of an in-house Yahoo. 2. Transactional portal. A front-end which lets you do as well as see things.

Problem. Sometimes, a way of blinding oneself to new opportunities. Dr David Cooperrider says “Once we describe something as a problem, we assume that we know what the ideal is - what should be - and we go in search of ways to close any ‘gaps’ - not to expand our knowledge or to build better ideals.”

Pronoia. The belief that the world is conspiring to make you happy and successful.

RDF - Resource Description Framework. A dictionary and thesaurus for XML tags that sits between XML and an ontology.

RLO - Reusable Learning Object. A discrete chunk of reusable learning that teaches one or more terminal objectives.

RSS - Real Simple Syndication, among other definitions. A format for syndicating blogs.

Search learning. When you learn from perusing Amazon, looking up topics on Google, or paging through business magazines on the airplane.

Semantic Web. Will enable computers to talk with one another. How we will address "the difference between information produced primarily for human consumption and that produced mainly for machines. At one end of the scale we have everything from the five-second TV commercial to poetry. At the other end we have databases, programs and sensor output. To date, the Web has developed most rapidly as a medium of documents for people rather than for data and information that can be processed automatically. The Semantic Web aims to make up for this." Tim Berners-Lee in Scientific American.

SCORM. Sharable Content Object Reference Model. Standards are very popular; that's why there are so many of them. SCORM is the Federal government's standard. It seeks to track and manage courseware developed by various authoring tools using a single system. The objective is to bring together diverse and disparate learning content and products to ensure reusability, accessibility, durability, and interoperability. Built on the work of AICC, IMS, the IEEE, and others. See www.adlnet.org for the latest. Coming under fire for narrow focus on self-directed learning as well as for military backing.

Shelf-life. Knowledge is perishable. Some suggest it be labeled with pull-dates, like cartons of milk. (And others point out that spoiled milk may have been put in the eLearning bottle to being with.)

SOAP - simple object access protocol. Describes how one application talks to a Web service and asks it to perform a task and return an answer. SOAP makes it possible to use Web services for transactions—say, credit card authorization or checking inventory in real-time and placing an order. See Web services.

Synchronous. [pretentious] Live event.

Tacit/explicit knowledge. Tacit knowledge is knowing how; it's impossible to transfer to it you in words. Explicit knowledge is the opposite -- you're reading it right now.

Technophilia. The belief that technology will solve all ills. Especially prevalent during the dot-com delusion, fostered by Wired magazine.

Timing. The first 90% of a development project takes 90% of the time. The remaining 10% also takes 90% of the time.

Training. An attempt to impose learning, often more at the convenience of the provider than the learner.

UDDI (universal description, discovery and integration) A virtual yellow pages for Web services that lets software discover what Web services are available and how to hook up to them. See Web services.

VOIP. Phonecalls over the Internet. When you conduct a meeting with Centra or Groove, people from all over the world can speak with one another with NO PHONE CHARGES. The technology is not yet out of the woods; unable to reach someone at Cisco last year, a colleague explained, "Oh, she's testing one of our VOIP phones. She never receives her calls."

Warchalking. Marking the location of open wi-fi connections to the net on the sidewalk or wall in chalk.

WSDL - Web services description language. If UDDI is a virtual yellow pages, WSDL is the little blurb associated with each entry that describes what kind of work the Web service can do—say, that it can give you access to a database of ZIP codes.

Web log. AKA blog. Try this one. "If journalism is the first draft of history, then blogging is sometimes the first draft of journalism...." says Ed Cone.

Web services. Standards that enable interoperability on applications on the net. Includes XML, SOAP, UDDI, and WSDL. More

Wireless learning. Tell me once again. If my cell phone craps out at random intervals, how will a wireless modem enable me to cut the cord?

Workflow Learning™Also, Workflow-based Learning™. Term coined by researcher Sam Adkins to describe the sort of learning the real-time extended enterprise requires. The merger of work and learning in Enterprise Application Integration. Seen Workflow Learning Institute. Term is trademarked by Internet Time Group.

XML. eXtensible Markup Language. Like HTML but more flexible because you can redefine tags to say whatever you want. Instead of <H1>, you might have <duration> or <invoice>. This enables computers to talk with one another without pesky human intervention.

For learning objects, XML is equivalent to the labels on cans at the supermarket -- it's lets you determine what's inside without opening the package. This enables an object-level Learning Management System to assemble strings of learning objects into personalized learning paths. See Web services.

YMMV. "Your mileage may vary." Recognition that your results may not be the same as mine. (Other things are never equal.)