My DevLearn 2010 Experience (#DL10)

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:

• The Power of Pull is strong.
• My personal learning network (PLN) is incredible, and so very important to me. I have so many trusted sources now I don’t remember what I did before I developed my PLN. To steal a line from Aaron, I don’t make many decisions without seeing what my PLN thinks first.
• Brent, David & Co. put on a helluva show.

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.

• Sumeet Moghe (@sumeet_moghe): Dude is incredible, to put it lightly. He owned the conference in tweets and live blogging (which allowed a lot of us to go off to attend other sessions). He nailed his presentation, E-Learning and Enterprise 2.0 Adventures at a Company of Cynical Techies. The best thing I learned from Sumeet: work = learning = work, and continuous feedback is the only way to go. Oh, and he almost made The Beard cry. Thank you, sir.
• Jane Bozarth (yes, that Jane): awesome dinner conversation. How to get buy in for SoMe? To paraphrase: “show them good examples, instead of letting them find bad ones on their own.”
• Aaron Silvers, a.k.a. The Beard, a.k.a. Mr. SCORM: Coffee at Blue Bottle (thanks Koreen) kicked off a flood of learning for me last week. As always, Aaron was fun to be around and learn from.
• Koreen Olbrish: The final concurrent session I went to (as did anyone else left at the conference, it seemed), New and Emerging Learning Technologies. High impact, useful information. Also commandeered the Dr. Strangelearn ARG. Thanks!
• Karen Burpee: Canadian, learner, gamer, buddy!
• Philip Hutchison (@pipwerks): the king of bringing me back to reality, in a good way. Also a partner in the fight for accessibility. 🙂
• Kevin Thorn (@learnnuggets): Wow. I thought he was just an Articulate guru, but the dude is an awesome designer, and gets it when it comes to user experience. Thanks for the great discussions, man. You do great things. I can’t wait to see what’s next!
• Tom Kuhlmann (@tomkuhlmann): great conversation at DemoFest, and his session on communities was great.
• Dave Mozealous (@dmozealous): I met the man with the hat (I should have gotten a picture), in person, finally! It’s so nice to have people who work for a company that are so willing to share with the community of users for their product. I ♡ Screenr.
• Kris Rockwell, Neil Lasher, Jason Haag rocked the Mobile Jam Session. Looking forward to learning more from these guys.
• Thanks also to Jane, Alicia, Gary, Clark, Matt, Mark, and Rob

Whew!

Interesting Vendors:

• VenueGen: Live 3D Meetings. http://www.venuegen.com
  More fun than WebEx, eh? Maybe.
• Cameo (From Yukon Learning): e-Mail Reinforcement
  Even if you can’t implement traditional (is that what we call it now?) social media in your learning (Twitter, Facebook, whatever), maybe you can get buy-in to do another form of interaction: e-mail. Yes, e-mail. Cameo is an interesting solution. You could also do your own scenario-based email system, using SharePoint or some combo of Outlook and Excel. It’s just another idea of how to keep your learners learning, even after the course is complete. Think about it.
• Jive: Social Business
  It works for ThoughtWorks – ask Sumeet how they’re using it – very cool.
• BlueVolt: Simple LMS (and more) – looking forward to talking to them soon.
• Articulate: still there, still the king, still a wonderful tool (in the right hands, with meaningful design)
• TotaraLMS: interesting new release from Kineo, but it’s Moodle 🙁
• OpenSesame: Rocked the expo with their sweatshirts and iPad giveaways. I heard @rovybranon won one? WTF!? I didn’t win one. WTF!? 🙂 Really, though, cool concept, really useful for freelance developers and small companies.
• eLearning Brothers: Some good stuff here. See if you find something you like. Cool guys.
• iSpring: Interesting? Complete ripoff of Articulate? I can’t decide.
• Bloomfire: rockin’ new social learning platform. Big question is, will people stay? I wish it had voting/ratings.
• ShareKnowledge LMS: LMS on top of SharePoint – could be very useful for small organizations, and some large ones, who need basic LMS features and already have SharePoint.
• Zebra: I could tell you, but I’d have to kill you (silly NDA). I can say the overload of branding (commercial, loud music, bags, “the lounge”, etc.) was annoying. I can also say the tool does not seem very “revolutionary”. Also see Philip’s reaction in his recap.

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:

• Steve Nguyen (@espnguyen)
• Cammy Bean (@cammybean)
• Philip Hutchison (@pipwerks)
• Koreen Olbrish (@koreenolbrish)
• DevLearn Resources Collected (@LandDDave)
• Laura Dickson