I have had several really gratifying exchanges with folks at the Workflow Insititute over the last couple of days. To begin with, two days ago, I got an email from Anne Henry at the Workflow Institute responding to this post, thanking me for spreading the use of the term “workflow learning” and sending me a white paper with more details about how they define the term. Delightful! Not only was somebody actually reading my blog; somebody official was reading it and responding to it.
Later in the day, I get an email from Jay Cross himself. He apparently had just discovered my admittedly harsh critique of an article he wrote in e-Learn. Jay’s tone was pretty cordial and good-natured, especially given that he was responding to a post that called his article “annoying hype.” (And for the record, let me apologize publicly for my somewhat less than collegial tone. While I stand by the substance of my comments, I certainly could have made more of an effort to present my critique in a tone that invited dialogue.) At any rate, Jay let me know that he felt that there was more to his position than I had gleaned from his article, lamented that there was no place on my blog to comment on posts, and suggested that I give him a call. Again, wonderful! That’s what I would call a gracious response.
Now, Jay did respond in his own blog before we had a chance to talk. All in all, it was a pretty gentle retort. While Jay made it clear that he is not going to apologize for being a visionary, he mostly took a “live and let live” position. Nevertheless, I do feel compelled to quibble with one particular sentence:
The author goes on to explain that I am blissfully ignorant, misleading people with Panglossian optimism, and that Web Services has nothing to do with the future of IT and learning.
Well, that’s not exactly what I said. I never suggested that web services has nothing to do with the future of IT and learning; rather, what I said was that web services are not sufficient to achieve the future that he projects. I still believe that. (I suspect that Jay does too; it just didn’t come out in his article.) I also certainly never suggested (or intended to suggest, anyway) that Jay was blissfully ignorant; to the contrary, I tried to make it clear that I generally like what he has to say (which is why his blog is on my blogroll). In fact, the reason his article got under my skin was precisely because I respected his work enough to hold him accountable for his words. I did suggest that that Jay’s optimism in the article was misleading, and that’s where the sound and fury came from.
At any rate, I really can’t complain about the response, over all (and he gets extra credit in my book for using the word “Panglossian” gracefully in a sentence). Jay and I have since talked on the phone about exploring ways to continue this dialogue in a more direct manner; neither of us thinks that blogging about each other (or toward each other, or whatever it is that you do when you engage in the indirect dialogues that blogs allow) is the most productive way to dig into the issues. I’m not sure where we’ll end up on this, but regardless, Jay and his colleagues at the institute deserve credit for responding with class.
