Technology

In my last few minutes of work today I've been reading the latest T&D (training & development) magazine. It's really got me to thinking about new technology and how it can help/hurt training. Most everything today is geared towards online learning, but currently I work in an enviornment where online isn't easily possible. I get so excited when I read about using Twitter in presentations and training classes and the awesome potential of products like Google Wave (and tons of others), but bottom line is I am in Manufacturing - technical training which has been hands on for years and years. Is this to say it shouldn't change? No, I don't think so. I think there are areas where we could utilize new technology to move ourselves forward. It's just a struggle to even get my trainers (my top people in the field) to a computer during the course of a day - very, very few of them have their own. It was a fight to make sure they could all get email access. I've tried to encourage the use of the computer by posting useful information on our internal Sharepoint site and it's helped a little, but not enough. This tells me the information really isn't that useful to them, but you have to consider the information I'm posting is stuff they generally know - it would be more useful to those that work below them - the one's that DON'T have computer access.
These thoughts will have to be continued later...