DevLearn, Reflected #dl10

As always, the eLearning Guild puts on a great show and this year’s DevLearn in San Fran was no exception. Heading home completely exhausted and in dire need of a foot rub – good signs of all the action there was.

Life as a booth babe

At the Kineo booth, we were busy on the stand talking about Totara – the new open source LMS for corporates – and showing off some our custom eLearning projects.

I was joined on the booth floor by our US CEO Steve Lowenthal, our new Director of Totara Jonathan Newman (who’s quite the smarty pants on open source and Moodle – welcome Jonathan!); and two of our colleagues/founders from the UK, Steve Rayson and Mark Harrison.

It’s really cool to talk to hear what eLearning challenges (and triumphs) people are facing in their own organizations. Best part of being a booth babe!

I had the chance to occasionally wander away from our booth and check out a bit of the other expo floor action:

• Saw a few glimpses of Allen Interaction’s new Zebra authoring tool
• Got to see a brief demo of Lectora Inspire
• Checked out the buzz at the Open Sesame stand (an online market place for your eLearning courses – think iTunes for eLearning)
• Saw the cool dudes from Bloomfire who are firing things up with social community
• Talked ARGs with the team from Tandem Learning who created the Dr. Strangelearn alternate reality game for the show and wore some really snazzy lab coats
• And, as always, got to see Tom Kuhlmann in all of his Articulate awesomeness.

Talking non-stop at DemoFest for two hours

DemoFest is a blast but boy oh boy is it exhausting.

I showed off a project I did for Paul Mitchell – a Moodle learning portal for sales reps complete with a program on color basics, interactive product knowledge brochures, a virtual salon to apply what they’ve learned and convince a salon owner to go with their products, and a final challenge.

My voice is shot from that experience…that’s for sure.

Congratulations to Kevin Thorne (@Learnnuggets) for winning best of show at DemoFest!

A smattering of keynotes and sessions

When you’re exhibiting in the expo it’s a bit hard to partake in many sessions, but I did get to jump into some of the keynotes: really great stuff by John Seely Brown (my blog attempt here), Byron Reeves on Engagement and Marcia Connors on the new social learning.

Sumeet Moghe ran a fun breakfast byte session on Friday, exposing the myths of eLearning. (He’s also done a mad job of live blogging his notes, so be sure to check out his blog!)

I had a quick poke in to hear what Sarah Kesher Sound80 had to say about audio in eLearning. Couldn’t stay but will definitely look for their slide deck.

Neil Lasher delivered to a packed house about the science of design – ran us through some research on fonts and layouts. (ITC Garamond wins!) In

teresting stuff. His slides should be up soon on the DevLearn site.

Final keynote session

My personal highlight was getting to be part of the final keynote session. Very cool to be a part of that – up on stage with some amazing people: Richard Cullatta, Aaron Silvers (aka “the beard” or “Mr. SCORM”), Jane Bozarth, Ellen Wagner and Gina Schreck.

We each got our five minutes of fame to tell the world our big idea.

I’ll try to get my slides in shape and post on slide share so you can check out my big idea – it involved pie. Intrigued? Or maybe hungry? I mean, what’s not to like about pie?

But it’s the informal stuff that REALLY matters

I don’t know if it’s possible to document all the random hall conversations while collapsed on the couch, but let me tell you, that’s where the real learning and connection happens. Got to meet so many people face to face for the first time, meet some new names and faces, and snark with the usual gang of suspects.

I feel a bit like a showboater if I try and tell you all the people I got to hang out with – but, wow, it does make a girl giddy!

(Mark Oehlert has the idea that next time we should just all get together and hang out on bean bag chairs for a few days. I’m so in.)

If you want to know more, I suggest you follow the #dl10 tweet stream on Twitter!

Looking forward to the next one!

Kudos to Brent Schlenker and all of the eLearning Guild team for putting on another great learning geek fest. See y’all next time! (And Brent, note bean bag chair idea above…)