Read my post at FloatLearning.com to see how this might affect your mLearning strategy.

The event’s venue is at the Fairmont Hotel and it really is a great place for an gathering the size of Devlearn. Plenty of space, lots of bandwidth coming into the building and a wealth of options in the area for meeting, eating and having some drinks with friends. (Not to mention the great Karaoke, right Aaron?) There are so many positive things to say about the conference, from the expo hall to the lunch conversations and various networking opportunities, it’s clear that the Guild knows how to organize and facilitate a professional and pleasurable conference.

The keynotes from Andrew McAfee (insightful and reassuring), Eric Zimmerman (fun, if a little bit spastic) and Leo Laporte (so good!) were awesome, with me spending a good amount of time geeking out with Mr. Laporte and chatting with him and a small group outside the main ballroom on a variety of topics ranging from Rupert Murdoch’s cluelessness to Android vs. iPhone development hurdles and also what’s next for TWiT and his plans for a great new digital delivery system coming soon for his content. I even got a picture with him… check it out. What a great guy and so super nice!

Some other really good things about this year’s event: A lot more real content on mobile delivery. This is notable not for the fact that there were sessions on mobile, but rather that they really were focused on the realities of today… That you can actually start to deliver for mobile due to the ever increasing ubiquity of capable devices. Exciting stuff!

Another welcome change this year, a LOT less commercial-like sessions on tools. This was a major problem last year in my opinion and it’s reassuring after talking o a number of Guild people that they are taking big steps to prevent this from occurring now. Nice work guys. Last year I would say fully 20-25% of all sessions I hit had a very infomercial feel to them and this year I can only recall a couple sessions that I hit that felt like that at all.

The DevLearn 09 Zombie Apocalypse Alternative Reality Game (ARG) set up for the conference was also super cool. I found a lot of great content and was able to connect with other attendees in a new way and overall it was a big success for the organizers and developers. The folks at Tandem and Hybrid Learning did some stellar work getting this up and running and I look forward to hearing more from them on how to roll these sorts of ARGs out to other organizations and events. I could see The Iona Group implementing a solution like this for one of our clients if the opportunity arose. That would be some serious fun!

A number of sessions I saw really had me enthralled and ready to use the knowledge gained. Bryan Chapman‘s talk on Repurposing Content for various delivery formats was so poignant and packed with facts. I need to review those notes and share the deck with my coworkers and some clients immediately. Seeing the esteemed Dr. Allen and his lead Flex architect, Patrick Krekelberg, from Allen Interactions, demo their new Adobe AIR app, Zebra was jaw dropping. I wish I had that software right now. I could be busting out some rich interactions and blowing clients minds. When finished, you can bet it’s going to shake up the industry. Dr. Allen, certainly had something with Authorware (begrudged as it may be, it was great eLearning development software for it’s day), and this appears to be just as much of a game changer, IMHO. The folks from JTInc. had some good info I will find useful in my localization efforts going forward. Lots of ideas popping! So many many others to mention… Too many to cover here, I think.

That said, the conference wasn’t all rainbows and unicorns for me. There are some real underlying problems I have with the conference’s overwhelming love affair with Social Media or Web 2.0 or whatever you may want to call it. Let me clarify that, please. It’s not that I don’t find Social Media useful for learning, for collaborating, for connecting. On the contrary, my Twitter feed teaches me so much every day. Our company’s Wiki is indispensible. The answers section on LinkedIn is a wealth of treasures I use all the time. This is the real problem… Isn’t it so pervasive at this point that it seems like stating the obvious over and over again is a bit of a waste of time in a conference like this? Do we really need 5-6 sessions about “Leveraging Twitter in your Learning Organization”? Now, I just made that session title up, but it may have been used for real… certainly a version of it was. The topic was beaten to death by the tons of people pounding it in. Given that Mark Oehlert so masterfully managed the Social Learning Jam as a dedicated area for discussion about using Social Media for learning in the eneterprise, it seems a tad silly to have so many concurrent session on the topic.

I may be cast out by talking so candidly about this, but here’s the crux of it for me: If the conference really is called “DevLearn” shouldn’t their be more “Dev” in the schedule? I mean, how hard is it to set up a Twitter account or get your IT to install a wiki these days? Not very. Couldn’t there be a slant to these Social Media topics to bring forth some real “Dev” issues? Here are some examples: “Integrating your Employee’s Twitter feeds into a HR friendly Dashboard using Adobe AIR”, “Connecting MediaWiki to your HR-IS Authentication Systems”, “Securing your Opensource eLearning Systems”, “Rejuvenating Legacy Learning Systems Via WebServices”, “Engaging your IT Department to Create Some Kick Ass Learning”. I would be very interested in hearing what other DevLearn attendees and Guild members think about this line of thought. From my point of view, there was very little content at the conference on actually “developing”, or at least what I would consider “developing”. I think I went to two or three sessions that dealt with real development topics, but that was about it.

Now, on to scheduling and time blocking. An issue I noticed is that with a venue and gathering of this size, you are sure to miss out on some great sessions due to concurrency and overlap of schedules. There were several times this happened this year. This was clearly evidenced to me last evening, when in the hotel lobby lounge I met Steven Wenrich, a highly talented Flash platform developer. He mentioned he had given a session that day on using Papervision in eLearning. Say wha? And I missed it? NOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!! When I told him that Mark Tovey and I had delivered a session on building your own custom ActonScript API for eLearning development, he felt the same way. Then, another person at the table let us know there was yet another session given at the exact same time on Augmented Reality in Flash for eLearning. This says to me that it may be time to split DevLearn into tracks. One track for software/coding/development. One track for content developers. One track for business/management. Maybe one track for Instructional Designers. Just a thought, but with 6 or more concurrent sessions going on at the same time, it would probably let some people see more content that really spoke to them, preventing walkouts and making sure you maximize your DevLearn experience. By splitting up tracks, it would a lot easier to avoid the scenario I mentioned, and, depending on how many tracks you wanted to create, it could virtually eliminate it.

Let me recap by stating though my criticisms may be sharp, they are meant to be constructive. And I also want to reiterate that the praise given is well deserved, the Guild truly has put together an unbeatable event again and I absolutely feel that it was time well spent and completely worth every penny spent to attend it. I will absolutely be attending again.

Additionally, here is the handout we provided to the session attendees to help them determine if an API was right for them:

The Iona Group will be going, with myself, Mark Tovey and John Feser all attending. Mark and I will be presenting. Our topic is about the use of APIs in eLearning. It’s a topic that is pretty dear to us. We have learned quite a bit about this through our experience getting Doctum up and running. The concept of building a resuable, sharable codebase is very prevalent in web and interactive development, but we have found that in the eLearning community it is relatively unheard of.

This could be due to a number of things, but by and large it appears to us that this may be in large part due to the fact that eLearning tools are not focused on separating content from presentation and behavior.

This practice is the foundation of of OOP and implemented in all of our work at The Iona Group. We’re happy to talk to others about it.

Here is the link to our presentation… check it out.

Beyond that, I am scheduled to participate in an upcoming exhibit featuring work by the poet laureate of Illinois, Kevin Stein. That should be a great time and allow for some real creativity!

I hope you are all enjoying a brief respite in your work right now for the dog days of summer and relaxing with a nice beer or iced coffee. I know I am. I just brewed an Imperial IPA, currently carbonating in the dark of my cool basement… first tasting, this week! Don’t know Imperial IPA as a style of beer… take a look at these beauties. My garden is coming in nicely, too, despite the Japanese beetles best attempts to eat it all!

How are you staying busy? What are you doing to blow off some steam this summer?

Our company has been using a wiki for about two years now. It’s great. We store all kinds of archival data, proposals, bios, fun stuff, procedures and process stuff, handbooks, etc. It’s pretty good, really. We grew it organically and haven’t applied a lot of doctrine in the management of it.

However, it hasn’t been without it’s bumps. Getting people to use it as a primary info source, record, etc is not easy. People are used to a public folder in Outlook or a directory on a network share… but gradually this trend is fading. Beyond that, preventing empty pages or information currency problems (gardening old content and pages out) is always going to be an issue with wikis. Really though, the main issue is getting it filled up in the first place. Here are some tips I have come across in my experience in maintaining ours, reading up on Wiki Patterns and just talking to a few other people I know that manage a wiki. I am by no means an expert in this, but in a Wiki who is? I hope these tips help you, and if you have any other original ideas let me know, or join WikiPatterns and contribute!

Here they are:

1. Hold a Barn-raising! – I first heard this from Tony Karrer and have since read up on it at wiki patterns. With a small amount of planning, this could be really successful in creating a few dozen pages to get your site started. Ask your coworkers to come hungry armed with their laptops and their valuable emails and assorted PDFs and word docs they always forward on to coworkers about process, procedures and tips on how to do their jobs. Order some lunch and start editing! Soon your site will be singing with content. In a comfortable environment like this, WikiNoobs can be schooled on how to work in the system. A great side effect of this is that your pages will start to share a voice or common formatting style and that adds value and coherency to the site!
2. Have a lesser informed or rookie employee fill up some pages with scaffolded content. This content just needs to be ‘kinda’ close. Then, have that same worker send the link on to a superior or mentor for final edit. Showing your expertise can be a strong motivator for some, so by creating a basic framework for content, you are priming the pump and creating an incentive!
3. Go easy on the WikiFormatting! I like HTML. I’m used to it. Many editors are by now. WikiMarkup, or WikiText can be a bit tricky to get used to. It’s got all kinds of rules and things that can easy to implement if you haven’t spent a few years editing web pages already. But for a seasoned web designer, it can feel like training wheels. In this vein, too much focus on making things pretty can slow things down in the creation of a basic wiki’s content. I’m not sure if noticed this on the WikiPatterns site listed as an anti-pattern, but I have just really recently started digging in to this site, so it may be there.
4. Just make it a requirement. Every employee should at least be in charge of their own bio page, right? I would argue that they should not only be editing their profile/bio, but also maintaining a process page if the if they are project manager, contributing to a project’s case study if they were the designer or developer for it, you see where I am going. Simply make it a part of a project’s delivery phase and there you go. Easier said than done, right?
5. Use the Wiki’s ‘Special Pages’. MediaWiki has a “Special:Specialpages” page that lists dead-end pages, orphaned pages, basic stats, most linked to, least linked etc. These links and tools will help you, the editor, manager, etc keep your wiki fresh. Not to be overlooked!

So that’s it for now. I’m going to continue editing my Wiki, and reading Wiki Pattterns. I’m very interested how you are using your Wiki at your work, and hearing your success and trials. Let me know what you are doing with ‘em!

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.