Instruments of capture

Instruments of Capture
It strikes me that there is an interesting spectrum that lies between the passive capture of information about someone (e.g. building a profile of an individual by auditing their various activities) and technologies that enable people to contribute more proactively (e.g. where you are encouraged to complete your online profile).

Trends may be heading in the direction of the former: perhaps indexing your emails for their knowledge content would provide a more complete KM platform than forums and wikkis?
On a separate note, it never ceases to amaze me how slow the e-learning industry has been to learn: I read a blog today to the effect that we are only now to be entitled to talk about e-learning (by contrast to e-training), since our interventions to date have not been sufficiently client-centred.

God's bread! it makes me mad: learning professionals with nothing more to boast about than that they are finally grasping what their learners were doing ten years ago. We don't need to encourage student 'ownership' - they already 'own' the information because they learned how to use Google; the question is what - if any - 'ownership' remains for the learning professional. Our learners have been 'doing it for themselves' for a while now - the real questions are around what role we might have to play.

If you sit and take stock of just how much easier it is to learn these days, it is almost unbelievable: I can learn climbing techniques by video using altavista's multimedia search; I can download hours of interactive tutorials on photoshop using p2p; likewise I can learn Cantonese as I drive thanks to availability of mp3s. I can learn how a Cisco router works - infamously, how to build an atomic weapon. Offhand I can't think of anything that I can't learn about within the next few hours, given the search tools available to me.