If NASA can do it...

Yesterday, I attended WIRED NextFest: Experience the Future, in Chicago's Millennium Park. It is billed as the premiere showcase of global innovations transforming our world. What I found was a large tent full of fascinating technology: the hoverit chair -- a plexiglass chaise lounge that uses repelling magnetic forces to keep the seat floating above the base -- the same technology as maglev trains; the Brainball, where two people wearing brainwave headbands that monitor stress levels and report the data to a computer sit across a table from each other and try to move a ball toward the other by relaxing! The lower your stress level, the faster the ball moves away from you and toward the other person; NASA's Climate Time Machine, which provides a global visualization of climate and atmospheric changes over the last centuries and is used to predict future climate changes.

I found all of this innovation awe-inspiring. I thought of the creativity, persistence and vision it took to develop these myriad and disparate technologies. If someone could figure out how to create plastic from CO2, surely I could conquer technology in one of its simplest forms: a blog. And so here it is. With this one small step, I'm beginning to experience my own future with a different, but equally important type of technology -- human performance technology. So far I've learned how human performance technology differs from instructional technology, which is closer to what I do in my day to day world. I also have learned that I have a lot more to learn, and that the hardest part is taking that first, tentative step.