This morning, hundreds of us packed the ballroom of the new Hyatt Regency Colorado Convention Center for the opening of TechKnowledge 06. Incoming ASTD president Kevin Oakes thanked the Rocky Mountain Chapter, advisory boards, hard-working staff, platinum sponsors, silver sponsors, planning committees, and others. Kevin and I go back quite a ways; Oakes Interactive was hawking multimedia training before the Web was invented. If I'm not mistaken, Kevin is the first educational technolgy specialist to lead ASTD.

Elliott Masie took the stage to encourage us to adopt Extreme Learning. We should devote half our time to making incremental improvements in what we've already got, for instance fine-tuning and revamping existing programs. The other 50% should go into things that are dramatically different.

He demonstrated a cool little device that projects a working keyboard on virtually any surface. (Elliott advises you not to use this as a sample of dramatically different thinking unless you want to lose your job.)

What if we started every day with a five-minute learning clip?

Business Week's one-question customer service evaluation: would you recommend this to a friend? Not a bad measure for the training business. Who's going to be first to base a training manager's pay on this?

Elliott described a cardiologists' conference where four large videoscreens are showing surgery live. An expert panel gives advice. The entire audience clicks in answers to questions. The Wisdom of Crowds meets medicine.

Elliott offers a new recruit three hours of face time. She says she'll take a pass, asks if he doesn't have a CD version. "Why would you want a CD instead of a live CEO?" The fearless recruit says, "You don't have a fast-forward button."

Excerpted from Internet Time Blog. Would you like to see more excerpts from other blogs posted to Learning Circuits Blog? Leave a comment.