I simply love this illustration of the brain from the current issue of Wired. The right brain/left brain distinction breaks down under the scanner -- most of us use both sides of our brains continuously. Nonetheless, as a thoroughly left-handed, right-brained, blue-state kind of guy, I was delighted to read that left-brained jobs are being outsourced or automated while the Conceptual Age rewards us arty, empathic, big-picture types.

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Training 2005 kicks off in New Orleans in four weeks. Cheap flights are still available. Cheap rooms are drying up, but not impossible; this evening I reserved a room at The Avenue Garden Hotel for $81/night.

If you're coming to N'awlins and have something to sell, join me in the Workflow Pavilion. For $1,850 all told, you get a kiosk on the Expo floor, a listing in the Expo directory and one full registration to the conference. The kiosk is wired and comes with sign. Essentially, you can be an exhibitor for about $700 over the price of a ticket. Email me if you'd like an application.

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Audio recordings of Emergent Learning Forum's discussion of collaboration and learning night before last are available on the ELF site. In my book, learning and collaboration are converging so rapidly, it's hard to say where one stops and the other begins.

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Meta-Learning -- looking at learning as a process, not an event -- may finally be ready for prime time. A documentary film crew filmed interviews with us last week. More news at the Meta-Learning Lab site.

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I'm re-reading George Leonard's Education and Ecstacy. It begins:

Teachers are overworked and underpaid. True. It is an exacting and exhausting business, this damming up the flood of human potentialities. What energy is takes to make a torrent into a trickle, to train that trickle along narrow, well-marked channels! Teachers are often tired. In the teachers' lounge, they sigh their relifef into stained cups of instant coffee and offer gratitude to whoever makes them laugh at the day's disasters.