I'm into the second week of my Web Services Theory class at OIT (Portland).  It's been a lot of fun so far.  We've gone over XML modeling, DOM, XmlTextReader, and last night some XPath/XQuery.  Not in too much depth, since what I'm really shooting for is a grounding in the idea of Web Services, rather than the technical details, but I think it's important to do some practical exercises to really understand the basics. 

Next were on to Xml Schema, then the joy that is WSDL.  I'm a little worried about WSDL.  It's a hard sell, and it takes a lot of time to explain the problems that WSDL was designed to solve that it turned out 95% of people didn't understand or care about.  Ah well.  It's what we have for now.