Dinner with an alphageek.

I had a great chat with Jon Udell last night. I noticed on his blog that he was coming to Wellington and left a note for him to get in touch if he was coming to Christchurch. He emailed me to say he was heading over here that very day! Bizzarely, the first I ever heard of the GOVIS conference he was keynoting at was via his blog post, if I’d found out about it earlier I would have been there, brandishing Interclue. Looks like there were some really interesting presentations there.

Among other things, we talked about how the internet is transforming education, and I mentioned that I’d spotted a video with some fantastic stats a while back that was originally designed to help educators understand what they were up against, and that I’d blog about it. He’ll probably recognise it when he sees it. But as JP mentioned recently, there are still a lot of other people out there who haven’t seen this one, and they really should.

Some background and references for the statistics.

He mentioned the real thing scaring American Universities was that soon more parents were going to start auditing podcasts from their kid’s lecturers to see if this education they were paying for was actually worth $x/minute!

We also chatted about his new job a bit. He said he went to Microsoft with a mission to help more people get value from the power of technology – to spend some time helping out on the trailing edge after so many years on the bleeding edge. I told him I thought Microsoft was showing pleasing signs of trying to build more value from co-operation than competition – he said Microsoft was still competing plenty hard but they were continuing to move towards less destructive forms of competition.

Then I came home and saw this. Sigh…