Control.

....So I am just home from a fab (or should I say 'magical'?) time at Training 2007. Kathy Sierra kicked _ _ _ , as usual, and it is always good to see Mr. Kirpatrick, Ms. Barbazette, Dr. Hale, et al.

I did my "collaboration on a shoestring" presentation, in w hich we explore training applications for free technologies like blogs and wikis. It's always a fun one, and very gratifying to see the 'ah-ha' lights in attendees' eyes when I show them "23 Things" or the ESL wiki project. What has me concerned, though, is that every, and I mean it, question asked during the session was on the issue of control: "What if they post inappropriate comments? Can I password protect it? Can I install inside our firewall?"

I know that these are legitimate concerns, and yes, there are solutions to them, but: No one asked any questions about effective design, results, whether we felt the approaches were working, etc.

This seems to come up again and again. People are concerned with tracking but not with outcomes. They're concerned with the equivalent of what we used to call "butts in seats" reports, with seemingly little regard for whether anyone can perform better after they leave those seats.