I’ve just come home from DevLearn 09. DevLearn is the eLearning Guild’s annual developer conference held in San Jose. This is the second time I have gone there, with this year being the first time I have spoken at the event. It was fantastic fun, holding lots of revelations and surprises. Now, tired but happy, begins the real work. The work of consolidating the notes, following up on the contacts made (some virtual contacts finally made real… I always love when that happens) and trying to make some steps to implement the great ideas I picked up there and talked over with new and old colleagues. (more…)

I’ll have a full recap on the conference later, but for now, here is our presentation deck. Enjoy!

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

The eLearning Guild’s annual developer conference is rapidly approaching. DevLearn 09 is sure to be a great event with keynotes from Leo Laporte and more. The conference this year is particularly interesting, with a complete ARG being played around a “Zombie Apocalypse” scenario. Teams, points, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Youtube and more are all coming together in a very fun interactive way. It’s been great so far! I’m looking forward to see where it goes once the conference gets started.

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.

The annual Spring <br /> conference was held this past week in Athens, Ohio at Ohio University. A number of very talented professionals gathered to talk shop with the attendees. Ben Pritchard, Kevin Hoyt, Greg Rewis, Stephanie Sullivan were among the cadre. All in all the conference went smoothly, even with the unfortunate absence of Eric Meyer. Eric was able to Skype in his presentation, so it wasn’t a total loss for attendees.

I presented two topics. One on Designer/Developer collaboration, the other a case study on a site we had just recently finished. The comments I go on the talks were all in all positive and I got a lot of great questions. Here is the link to the Developers are from Mars slides and here are the slides for the Case Study presentation.

I really thought that mix of designers and developers for the conference was cool and certainly out of the ordinary. It’s not often you get something so heterogeneous at an event, so to talk to a truly mixed crowd was tons of fun!

Many thanks to the conference organizers for putting together a great day.

Just got confirmation that I will be presenting at Spring <br /> Conference. I’m really looking forward to this. It’s a one day, web design and standards focused event with a fantastic lineup of presenters. I’ll be there, joining Kevin Hoyt, Eric Meyer, Stephanie Sullivan, Daniel Shutzsmith. I’ll be presenting a session on designer/developer collaboration and another session on a website design case study profiling some reent social media and RIA work we have completed at The Iona Group. Very cool.

The event is approaching rapidly, so get signed up today. It’s only $65 for professionals, $20 for students. A great price for this kind of content.