DevLearn 2012 Wrap Up #devlearn

Wrapping up a few days in Las Vegas for this year's eLearning Guild DevLearn 2012 conference.  I could NOT miss Halloween with my kids, so flew in Thursday afternoon.  So I missed a lot, but still had enough time to talk my head off and soak in a lot of elearning goodness.

Shortly after I arrived, I jumped on stage to participate in a panel with Koreen Olbrish, Janet Clarey, Jane Bozarth, and Jeannette Campos on New Emerging Tech. Great format as we pulled Jeannette in from Skype and Jane on Twitter.  Koreen handed us a new topic every five minutes-- from QR codes (hot or not?) to 3D printers.  

At 3:00 I presented a concurrent session on Putting the Design Back into Instructional Design (slides forthcoming!) I had everyone closing their eyes and imagining "good design" - forks and phones and Harry Potter rides came to mind.  Not surprisingly, eLearning examples were not the first thing to pop into people's minds.  We talked a lot about Design with a big D and then came back to elearning and what we can all do to be better DESIGNERS of elearning.  

The afternoon/evening was all about DemoFest.  I shared a demo of an example of our new Responsive Elearning Design Framework - all HTML5.  If you want to know more about RED, check out a webinar presentation that Steve Rayson did last month.  

The downside of presenting something at DemoFest is you can't wander around and see what everyone else is doing.  I did get to check out some interesting work at the next table over that Reuben from EdCetra Training showed off:  a responsive onboarding program developed as an "app store.  Each app is a short onboarding exercise and the whole thing is built off the TinCan Experience API. 

Which leads me to Tin Can. You couldn't walk through the conference this year without tripping over one...

So Friday morning I listened to a panel on TinCan - "Everything you ever wanted to know..." And while it may not have answered everything I want to know about the new Experience API and what many are calling "the new SCORM", it was useful to hear some real world examples and listen to the questions of real developers who are trying to figure out what the impact of this will be.  There's a lot of hype about TinCan at the moment...and a lot of confusion.  My message to people: no need to panic.  This will take time.

Then I sat in on a session with Sharon Boller (@sharon_boller) on converting a PC based elearning course to an iBook. I've been playing around with iBook Author recently and think it could really meet the needs of a lot of what gets produced as elearning these days. Sharon did a nice job presenting their design process and the finished output.  Learn more about their project and download a demo from the Bottom Line Performance site.

The closing keynote (and so sorry I missed Wednesday's fire breathing keynote!) wrapped up with a hilarious eLearning Guild documentary. The final speaker, Dayna Steele, urged us to find our inner rock stars and to be nice to each other.  Karma pays off, man.

Of course, the most memorable bits of the conference are the informal hallway chats, the late night beer of elearning conference, and the Las Vegas experience.  Last night, I saw The Beatle's LOVE -- a Cirque du Solelil extravaganza.  Talk about experience design! 

So thanks to the eLearning Guild for putting on another memorable conference.  

I'm off to catch a plane home now!  See you on the other side.