When people ask me about my background in e-learning or my background in technology, I have to fess up that I don’t have either.

My educational and training background are rooted in journalism and English literature (in other words, reporting and critical thinking). I’ve come to learn enough about technology to be able to ask the right questions, speak to the right people, and read the informative resources — and that’s essentially how I gather information. I don’t do e-learning myself, but I still feel I am accepted among the community based on those other credentials.

When it comes to asking the right questions, from a journalistic mindset, sometimes you have to ask the “dumb” questions, the ones that probably have blatant and obvious answers. We’ve all heard, “There’s no such thing as a dumb question,” but then again, we’ve all poked fun of that adage, too, and for good reason. Some questions are pretty dumb.

If you are inside the circle of e-learning professionals, you are part of its linguistic community, meaning you have a vocabulary that you all agree upon and use for specific meanings within your field. For example, the word “student” might have a general meaning when used in conversation with a wider audience; but among e-learning professionals, using the word “student” rather than “learner” in fact carries a specific meaning. As an outsider to this linguistic community, I very often have to ask for clarification of words. And that’s where things can get dumb. On the one hand, I don’t want to take for granted the difference between “learner” and “student,” but on the other hand, it’s hard to know when, for example, “synchronous” simply means “synchronous.”

Every now and again, I ask a question that seems like it would be “dumb,” but it turns out to be a lucrative opening for much more interesting questions.

Recently, I’ve been talking to the members of a group called The Internet Time Alliance, five e-learning professionals who work together to not only serve clients, but also bat around ideas in the e-learning world in hopes of improving it.

It took a few dumb questions to start to understand what the group does. “What does the group do?” Answer: Discuss e-learning. “So are you like a writers’ circle? Do you collectively get together to discuss all your ideas, philosophically?” Answer: No, not like a writer’s circle. …
Then I asked Jay Cross, one of the founding members, somewhat tangentially, “By the way, where did the name Internet Time Alliance come from, and what does it mean?”
Excerpts from his reply:

You are the first to ask what Internet Time Alliance means!
The concept of Internet Time was born of Netscape’s accomplishing in a single year what would have taken at least seven years before the net came alive. Wikipedia puts it this way: Internet time was a common catchphrase that originated during the late-1990s Internet boom… People who worked with the Internet had come to believe that “everything moved faster on the ‘net,'” because the Internet made the dissemination of information far easier and cheaper. In layman’s terms, ‘Internet Time’ involves efficiencies inherent to digital transactions that are produced by the virtual reality of one product, one product type, or one service provided to consumers from one virtual cash register residing on one server. The amount of time required to conduct simultaneous transactions is reduced to irrelevance…
I have long believed that the pace of time is speeding up. (Can’t you feel it?) It’s not that the Cesium clock counts shorter seconds but rather that clock time is not the same as our experience of the time we live in. More happens in one of your minutes than in one of your grandfather’s hours.
We are in a period of extreme time deflation. …
The Alliance part of the name comes later” [see Working Smarter in Terra Nova under the subheading “Inside a Community of Practice” for more]

Knowing the origin of the group’s name opens up so many more questions about its mission and philosophy. It will inform other questions I ask them in the future about how they see the state of technology in relation to learning, training, and workplace environments. It makes me wonder what their assumptions are about people who are avid users of technology, and whether research findings before 2002 about learning are fundamentally not useful today.