War, disease drive up conferencing. Anecdotal evidence shows that multinational companies are turning more frequently to phone and video conferencing in light of the war in Iraq and the flulike disease in Asia. [CNET News.com]

I think this is just one more pair of forces driving us toward more synchronous (and eventually toward more asynchronous) e-Learning. It is also moving us toward more professional conferences taking place on line rather than at remote locations. I would look to see solutions such as blogging and peer-to-peer (eg, Groove) substituting for the social interactions that take place at conferences.

This still isn't an ideal or direct one-to-one substitution, though. Issues that will have to be resolved: payment for events, structure for participants, intellectual property and drm, vendor participation, bandwidth requirements (lots of people are going to be attending on dialup connections from home).

11:03:27 AM    

Messaging key to Web services, CTOs say. Reliable messaging considered at least as important as security [InfoWorld: Top News]

Another huge area of need limiting online learning. If learning is offered online by vendors as a web service, in many cases there will be a need for messaging between the online learning application and an LMS or LCMS running on the employer's system. All of these applications and services need to be talking to each other, and SCORM ain't the answer (imho) due to firewall restrictions and other security concerns.

11:02:43 AM