I just spent 5 days in San Jose. One of the managing partners , John and I went to DevLearn08. It’s a conference put on by The eLearning Guild focused on development topics and emerging technology in eLearning.

A little context for you. The consulting company I work for, The Iona Group, develops rich media communication solutions for a variety of clients and purposes. One of those areas being eLearning instructional design and content production for corporations, educational institutions and non-profit organizations. Really though, that is just one facet of the tech I work in daily, with a large portion of it being large scale web design and development, rich internet application development and tradeshow/exhibit design and development. It’s a pretty multidisciplinary company, with little zealotry allowable in development technology platform or final deliverable format.

That said, it allows a great deal of research time and in turn, insight into a number of niche technologies and trends today. Web communities, rich interactions, multimedia installations, high definition video production and motion graphics and a number of other high end, deep subject matter areas are where we play.

All that in mind, when it comes to my assessment of the DevLearn08, I have to pause and take a deep breath. While I was impressed with the breadth of technologies, techniques and emerging trends I observed, and the sessions I attended, I had some preconceptions that I held shattered, when it came right down to it. I was under the impression that most companies had already joined the blogosphere and the wiki community on some level. The actual adoption of web2.0 tools in the average corporate eLearning group seems very low in my opinion, with less than one out of three eLearning Guild survey respondents stating that they have implemented or are in the process of implementing web2.0 technologies in their eLearning efforts.

Before getting to that let’s recap the event’s details, speakers and focus. The event took place from November 9, 2008 to November 14, 2008. It was held at San Jose’s Fairmont hotel, a beautiful place with a lot to offer conference goers (the neighborhood is densely packed with restaurants and entertainment). There were three keynote speakers, Tim O’Reilly, Dan Roam and John Medina. The conference seemed to be meant to acclimate eLearning professionals with some of the more advanced or new technological trends in eLearning today.

The first day was the Adobe Learning summit a co-located conference at the Fairmont. It was largely a commercial for Adobe‚Äôs eLearning focused tools, Captivate, Presenter and Connect. No real surprise here. There was a sneak peek given of Captivate Next (4). It looks pretty kick ass, IMHO. Flash widgets, AS3, much more flexible import and export options including respect for CS4 file layers really make this a tool worth looking out for. Additionally, they made mention of a dedicated eLearning development suite that looks to add some great capabilities to Flash, Dreamweaver as well as revised versions of a few other applications. I’m sure a lot more will come out this week with Adobe MAX going on in San Francisco. Really really cool stuff. After the day‚Äôs infomercial, there was a reception held at Adobe‚Äôs headquarters. It was a great night for networking and I got to meet some excellent people, guild members and staff alike. Not bad at all!

The next day was a collection of symoposiums and workshops. I attended a symposium entitled “The eLearning 2.0 symoposium” put on by the guild’s Tony Karrer and Brent Schlenker, DAU’s Mark Oehlert and Jane Hart. A day well spent, no doubt, full of revelations on my part as to where in technology’s adoptance timeline eLearning professionals sit. We were each provided with a copy of the eLearning Guild’s 360 report on using web2.0 technologies in the corporate eLearning marketplace. This report is packed with insights and I would highly recommend you join the guild to gain access to this invaluable resource. The day consisted of presentation coupled with loose team exercises focused on how and when to employ some technologies like wikis, blogs, rss, microblogging, as well as authoring tools and techniques. It was a open and honest discussion, where some participants voiced their concerns and barriers they encountered in implementing these technologies in their workplace.

It was here that I recognized the same old story I hear time and time again in working with clients on eLearning projects. Many of the people were seemingly unaware of the potential that these tools held for their team. How did a Wiki or blog contribute to the overall learning efforts for their company, etc., etc.? The ones that did recognize the need to allow for informal learning and collaboration seemed stagnated by their corporate hierarchy or held hostage by non-progressive IT teams. Sad. I feel that the afternoon helped many of the people in the room, with Mark Oehlert spending considerable time talking about the internal sales process in getting stakeholders to buy in to informal learning and advanced technologies. He really did a great job of stressing that when selling the solution to the IT or C-Level execs to focus on the business need and minimize the talk of the actual technical implementation. Simple advice, but effective.

The subsequent days were a blur of presentations and sessions. Some were more valuable than others. There was an alarming amount of sessions that really came off as advertisements for a product or service, which always smacks as tacky to me. I was sure to make note of this on the evaluation forms and hope the guild takes notice. I heard a number of other attendees making mention of this, too.

Some real brightspots…

• David Wilkins from Mzinga gave an interactive and fun presentation to a full room about eLearing 2.0 success stories, discussing the Intelpedia and a number of other informal learning approaches like community produced forums/knowledgebases.
• I also attended an interesting session on using cinematic techniques in the rich media you use n your training. This was largely about cinematography, and while the presenter wasn‚Äôt that great, the topic is definitely something that many eLearning producers should pay heed to. Production quality matters. People are tired of talking head videos delivered at a postage stamp size. With Flash‚Äôs ability to display HD quality video and the continued drop in CDN and videos server cost, it‚Äôs only a short matter of time until such quality will be expected in your training content as well.
• Reuben Tozman from EdCetera gave a fascinating session on Semantic Web technologies impact on training/eLearning content production. While the topic is a bit heady and probably won‚Äôt have a direct impact on content producers for some time, this is essentially the bridge to what will undoubtedly be known as web3.0. All content will have meaning. All content will be readable, searchable, findable by machine and accessible to users. Bold stuff!

All in all, the conference was a resounding success. I got much more familiarized with the eLearning community (while I have developed a lot of learning content, I have never really socialized much with the community at large), we got a chance to demo our stuff at DemoFest 2008 and I met a lot of great eLearning professionals. If you are one of those, don’t be surprised if I drop you a line soon.

Posted on November 18, 2008

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