On the night stand - what Jay Cross is reading - Brief Article

T+D, August, 2002 by Jay Cross

I'm a book junkie. Six-foot-high bookcases line the walls of my house in Berkeley. When the big quake hits, you don't want to be here.

I usually read about a dozen books simultaneously. I'm halfway through Andrew Weil's Eating Well for Optimal Health because I'm reinventing myself into a thin person. I'm also reading Monica Bhide's The Spice is Right. Who knew that an e-learning product strategist could also be an excellent cookbook author?

I'm also about halfway through Tom Stewart's The Wealth of Knowledge, a wonderful book not only because Stewart has pegged the rights and wrongs of knowledge management, but also because his language is delightful. His wit brings a smile to my face at least once a page.

I've just started David Weinberger's Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web. Weinberger and I both pray at the altar of the transformational power of the Web. His site Journal of the Hyperlinked Organization

* www.hypororg.com pillories hyperbolic vendors mercilessly.

Planning my company's next session, visual learning, led me to Leonard Shlain's The Alphabet Versus the Goddess. This book presents a biased but intriguing romp through history that purports to show that the linear process of writing and reading led to male dominance in society (and the demise of goddesses), which is only now being rebalanced by our increasingly visual culture.

Jay Cross is CEO of the eLearning Forum and principal of Internet Time Group; jaycross@internettime.com.

Jay Cross, who penned this month's Nightstand, wrote and mimeographed his own newspaper in fourth grade. Our Contributors' Questionnaire asks, What's your claim to fame? Cross says, "I was one of the first people to start using the term e-learning."