I started with a morning buzz session with Jay Cross. He told us how he deals with the information overload that is flooding all of us. The message is simple. You go from push to pull, with RSS feeds you pull information in instead for searching it on the web. The second step is that he uses software (Aggregage) to store, organize and publish the information he pulls in. This way he creates a place where people can go to see his selection of information for certain topics. This means that people are replacing search engines. Instead of looking things up with google you plugin to the knowledge of somebody who is an acknowledged specialist in his field. Jay does this on workingsmarterdaily.com. Another example is the Elearninglearning the site of Tony Karrer. This blog and the easygenerator blog are ‘republished’ or aggregated through that site.
And that covers the keynote of the day too. Steven Rosenbaum presented ‘the future of learning is context’ and his story was an exact copy of Jay’s. Steven calls this ‘curation’ and told us that by publishing (like this blog or a twitter feed) we are all curating information. Funny coincidence to have those two session back to back with exactly the same message.
After the keynote the expo demanded our attention, I wasn’t able to go to other sessions. That is the flip side of being an exhibitor, you are there for others and not for yourself. I wished I was able to clone myself and do both.
The expo has been very good for us we have a ton of leads en the coming weeks will be packed with following up, giving webinars and assisting people who signed up for the 30 day trial. It’s great, it is why we are here.
I also presented on the ‘Emerging technology stage’ together with Marten du Prez of aNewSpring. I showed how you can create individual learning paths within an e-Learning course, he explained how they make it possible to create individual learning paths between courses. I told how frustrated I got when I was creating e-learning courses. You work from learning objectives and design a course based on that. Then you go into your authoring tool that doesn’t have any support for learning objectives and you loose it all. In stead you end up with a powerpoint like course that reports based on page progress. It turns out , frustration is shared by almost every developer. I compared page progress with giving a car key to somebody and telling them that they have to stick it in the contact of the car for 10 hours and then they will get their drivers license. You don’t do that, why should we approach e-learning like that. By the response I received it seems that we have found a working solution for this problem and that we are adding real value for both the developer and the learner. Michael Allen, the CEO of Allen interactions came over to me in a bar and told me that he loved our approach of learning objectives. That’s another sign that we are on track.
The rest of the day was filled with meetings and working at the booth. I had lunch with Eric Berg, he is the Executive director of Lingos. They are a great organization that supports ngo’s with e-Learning facilities and knowledge, they really make a difference with their work and I’m a fan. Easygenerator is a sponsor of LINGOs, offering easygenerator for free to all associated ngo’s. On a personal title I’m an ambassador for them, trying to gain more support in Europe. I will represent LINGOs at the online Educa. It’s always an inspiration the meet Eric and I’m happy that I can make a contribution to his organization.
We had a quit evening dinner with our team and evaluated the expo and made plans for how to follow all those leads in the best possible way. For us DevLearn is a huge success and we will be back next year at the expo.Yesterday was the last day of the expo so I will have some time to attend sessions today. That and some meetings will fill the last day of the conference.
The Learning 2019 conference
I have been to a ton of learning conferences but this will be my first time at #learning2019. I’m looking forward to it and I’m planning to report on all interesting sessions via this blog.
