Oh, hey, look what Judy and I did a few weeks back: our 8th episode of The ToolBar.
It was a fun show. We talked about DevLearn. I drank the lovely Saint Arnold Santo.
I’m really looking forward to recording this week with special guest, Julie Dirksen, Instructional Designer, usability guru and author of Design for How People Learn. I wonder what she’ll be drinking?
I’m at DevLearn, the premier conference in the learning industry.
This is always a great conference. The Guild does a great job getting excellent keynotes in. I also get to attend Kevin Thorn’s precon session today, How to Put the Story in Storyboarding for eLearning. I’m really looking forward to learning from him.
Between Kevin (@learnnuggets) and Aaron Silvers (@aaronesilvers), I should drastically improve my ability to communicate visually by the end of the week. This is most excellent.
I brought my iPad, iPhone, and a Snowflake microphone for recording snippets, and, maybe, a full show with Judy. Judy and I plan to interview vendors and some other learning celebrities for our elearning podcast, The ToolBar. If you have a request for questions we should ask vendors, let us know.
This is my fourth or fifth DevLearn. I always learn something new and grow my personal learning network (PLN). If you’re going to be here, look me up! Ping me via the conference app, Twitter or my contact form. I look forward to meeting more folks I’ve only interacted with online.
I’ll be posting a lot of photos and session reviews. I also recommend the following resources whether you’re attending or not.
DevLearn 2010 was awesome. If you followed the backchatter, you already know this. If you didn’t, here’s my review of the conference, a little about who I met, what I learned, and what I’m going to do.
I already posted my opening keynote recap. John Seely Brown set the tone for the conference. I actually took his Power of Pull idea and applied it directly to DevLearn. I don’t know about you, but, for me, most of these conferences have a lot of sessions that either turn into sales pitches, are not exactly what the speaker described in the session overview, or simply take too much time to get to the meat of the topic.
So I pulled what I could from the ones I was interested in. Some of them kept me in the entire time. Others had me walking out early. A few I got some basic information, left, and followed the tweets from that session. Still others I knew the speaker, or knew I could review his or her blog for most of the same information that was in the presentation.
In between sessions, at lunch, at dinner and at DemoFest, I met with as many peers and vendors as I could and absorbed as much information as possible.
So now you know how I attended this conference. Here is some of what I learned:
Now you know what I learned. Here’s who I met, ate dinner with, and learned from:
I’m not going to be able to mention everyone I learned from last week, so apologies to those left off.
Whew!
Interesting Vendors:
Really, though, cool concept, really useful for freelance developers and small companies.What I’m Going to Do Now
I’m going to continue to share the resources I’ve gathered. I’m going to spread the message that change is not bad, that smart change is important, that we can bridge silos, open the culture, and innovate as individuals and as organizations.
I’m going to continue to share information and help others produce better learning. As you already know, I’m passionate about the end user, and what his or her experience is. Focus on the user. Make it accessible. Period.
I’ll have more session and keynote reports up later this week.
Others posting about DevLearn 2010:
The book: The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion
Yesterday’s opening keynote for DevLearn was John Seely Brown (USC).
“A new culture of learning in a world of constant change.”
We need learning on demand. It’s not longer push learning, it’s pull. Traditional, old school thinking is not working. Something has to give.
Referencing Alfred Chandler (Push Economy):
This worked, more or less…
Then the game changed. We have had exponential advances in computation, storage, and bandwidth…
If you get stuck, find out what you need, collaborate, pull assets in to resolve problem. Find out what worked and what didn’t work, reflect, fix, learn.
The crisis of imagination: “what could I do now?” Embrace change. Don’t fear it!
Second shift is the explosion of data. Eric Schmidt (Google): “We create as much info in 2 days as we did from dawn of man through 2003.”
Ahh, but this is a loaded statistic…
“What is ‘information’? Don’t think we’re creating that much knowledge or poetry or art every 2 days.”
(via @moehlert)
What do we need to do?
Maui had never produced a champion surfer. Dusty Payne told his dad he wanted to be a champion surfer. He and his friends teamed up, competed, built a competition no had ever seen. They learned from each other and created a new version of surfing – aerial surfing. Dusty became the first junior champion to come out of Maui.
How’d they do it?
They were never discouraged by failure. They collected videos of other surfers. They analyzed, deconstructed, and figured out what moves were going on. They did the same with each other. They videoed and analyzed. They also pulled ideas from other adjacencies – wind surfing, skateboarding, etc. They leveraged networks of practice in an ecosystem. They brought in others (attracted them) to help them.
They were in constant, deep, collaborative learning with each other.
They were also Willing to fail, fail, fail until they did the “impossible.”
WoW has over 12 million players, online, around the world. Most commit a minimum of 20 hours per week to the game.
This is the first domain where we’ve been able to research exponential learning. Is it the only place where there is not diminishing returns?
It is a joint, collective agency or activity.
When I was playing Battlefield 2, I would get together (virtually) with some friends, form a squad, and we would set goals and plan attacks. We’d split up the duties. One of us would be the medic, one an engineer, one special ops, etc. We learned from each other, helped each other achieve goals, and collectively learned from our mistakes (and our successes).
The key: people are self-organizing, creating teams to accomplish goals and learn together.
In WoW, players have customizable dashboards:
There is also a knowledge economy around WoW.
How do you process 10-20K new ideas per night?
Access: find, learn, connect – do this to address UNANTICIPATED needs.
It’s curation and on-demand access to resources.
Attract: “how do you find something you don’t know you need to know?”
Achieve: “how do you build networks that feed themselves”
- bigger picture: more people that participate, the greater the potential return
In the 20th century, the goal was to minimize transaction cost and achieve scalable efficiency.
In the 21st century, the goal is to achieve scalable capability building (build talent).
How?
Expose your organization to edge thinking – fail, try, fail, try – it’s a necessary cycle. Try things that are unimaginable – happens daily at Google.
Create contexts. Create mashable, re-mixable dashboards, done for us, not management. Build social communities where employees learn rapidly from each other.
What is this Next button you speak of? I don’t think I’ve built a course in over a year that had one. Think outside the navigation woes. DESIGN the flow of instruction and you’ll be amazed at how awful you relied on that button.
- Kevin Thorn (@LearnNuggets)
Great quote from Kevin on the use of the Next button in elearning. Think outside the box, people. There’s more out there than “click next to continue.”
