I generally leave conferences both exhilarated and exhausted, and sitting on the flight home from three days in Chicago at the ASTD International Conference and Expo, I realize this one was no exception.
(What I would give right now for a foot rub. Anyone?)
Three days of booth babe duty at our lovely Kineo stand with my colleagues Steve Lowenthal, Steve Rayson, Mark Harrison and Gabe Rosenberg.
There was a lot of energy this year, overall felt like a lot more bustle and excitement than at last year’s ICE. As Ron Burns of Proton Media said, “what recession?”
I had no time to attend any sessions, but did imbibe much learning and connections nonetheless:
Moodle
On the stand, we had lots of interest in our corporate Moodle LMS offering. I’ve asked before whether the corporate Moodle is at a tipping point, and the strong indicators are, yes. Yes, indeed.
Companies want the flexibility and freedom of an open source model. People are frustrated with ongoing licensing fees, lack of good customer support and responsiveness from traditional LMS vendors, and slow time to implement.
I heard a lot of, “I’ve been looking into Moodle and we’re really interested...tell me more.” (If you want to know more, be sure to read some of the case studies on the work we’ve been doing in the corporate Moodle space).
Hanging out with Mr. SCORM himself
What I like most about Aaron is that he can talk about these really technically confusing things like metadata and metaparadata and the semantic web and I sort of get it.
Aaron and I talked about his vision for the new SCORM. Expect to see some exciting changes to SCORM in the next bit.
Getting social
I didn’t have a lot of time to cruise the expo hall (man, there were a lot of vendors!), but I did make a point of checking out Bloomfire and their Collaborative Social Learning Community. Josh has a great vision of helping groups put out user generated content in an easily accessible way. Bloomfire (@Bloomfire) even has a built in screencasting and video recording tool, making it super easy for people to share informal bits with each other.
Talking leadership
I love connecting face to face with people I’ve known online and I really enjoyed meeting Terrence Wing. (@TerrenceWing) Terrence does leadership training and is very involved with ASTD (he was on the conference committee!) I like his approach to training, “We create leadership packages – tools and resources for 
Talking content
As always, it was great to connect with Thomas Stone (@ThomasStone) of ElementK and hear what they’re up to with off-the-shelf content and LMSs. He’s possibly the most sincere person in the eLearning biz. And I mean that most sincerely.
Meeting the legends
I’ve known Professor Karl Kapp for y
Great to catch up on his book (Learning in 3D continues to be a top seller!) and he even brought around Ron Burns of Proton Media to share a what’s happening in the immersive learning space.
Be sure to check out Karl and Ron's video tour of ASTD!
Top tips
Our own Steve Rayson was on the prowl with his flip cam, recording eLearning top tips from the likes of Mark Harrison of Kineo, Tom Kuhlmann of Articulate, Karl Kapp, Allen Partridge of Adobe, Ethan Edwards of Allen Interactive, and yours truly. Check out all the new additions to the Kineo TV channel.
Here’s a few to get you started:
All in all, a great show! Thanks to all of you who stopped by our booth and look forward to seeing you next year!
My live blogged notes…ASTD TechKnowledge 2010 in Las Vegas, NV.
Allison Rossett is a Professor of Educational Technology at University of San Diego and noted author.
Recap of her recent article for ASTD: e-Learning – What’s Old is New Again
When you say you’re doing elearning what are you doing? The big names talk about how web 2.0 is turning courses on their heads (Downes, Rosenberg…)
Here’s how Rossett created survey:
Step 1: Defined what’s in and what’s out
Step 2: Defined the options
They constructed 26 snapshots (options derived from literature, conferences, blogs, etc.) – e.g., “Our programs are delivered in a virtual classroom. Employees join an instructor and classmates at a scheduled time.” or “Our programs are delivered on mobile devices.”
Step 3: Piloted and edited
Step 4: Solicited participation from 5 sources – elearning guild, learning circuits, trainingindustry.com, ISPI, PINOTnet.ning.com)
This is not a random sample, but rather opportunistic! Self-selected people who are already out in tech circles.
953 respondents to survey.
The results are suggestive and provocative. Take them home and engage in conversations with your colleagues. Use this data to advance dialogue within your organization.
So what do you think is typical of practice today? Are you doing any of these in your organization?
Top 5 practices (these are the most common, but still not that common – showing there are no typical practices!):
Bottom ranking practices:
What of you? Which best describes you as you think about the many possible manifestations for e-learning?
What of blended learning? (Blended = some of this, some of that, bound together)
Why blends? -- it’s like a good dinner, multi-modal, has variety and autonomy…
Rossett’s best reason for blends: lessons, information and support (performance and coaching) goes where the need is – into the workplace (need to keep your blend from flopping around).
What of the much touted 2.0?
[Data of the crowd in the session is matching data from her survey results.]
Second Life – figures debating the benefits of first life: http://tinyurl.com/ylfksgh Very fresh!
Top 10 Aspirations (out of 26) – asked to pick your top 3 aspirations:
But looking at results – there is no cluster. Web 2.0 is high on the list…
Barriers
Current professional practice does not match what we hear at conferences, on blogs, etc.
Clayton Christenson ~ “we incrementally improve what we’re doing today, we tinker with courseware, instead of taking advantage of learning disruption that is happening all around us!”
Current practice is more additive than supplantive (disruptive) – we add a podcast to a current course. Don’t start with the status quo and then make it a little better…
Look at great practice and tease out what great managers do: www.Positivedeviance.org
Are we over cautious – should we do MORE?
What does it mean?
What are YOU going to do? What are you going to do differently?
Weigh in please – http://tinyurl.elearningpractice -- Add your data to the set, see what the 26 snapshots are, etc. Make Allison’s dreams come true – sit around with your colleagues and talk about the 26 snapshots, talk about the opportunities…
For the record, Allison Rossett is an awesome presenter!! Funny, engaging, opinionated and lots of expertise.
This are my liveblogged notes from Thursday, January 28 Keynote at ASTD TechKnowledge 2010 in Las Vegas, NV.
Richard Hilleman, the man behind the EA sports brand (Madden football) -- currently focused on EA’s internal university.
People Lie…
…but their actions don’t.
This is the most important trend in video game design.
(When people lie, they make his job harder).
Who is Richard Hilleman?
Worked for EA for 25 years. Since 1983. In the business of making video games. producer, designer, production manager, has run studios, has been a teacher. Now Chief Creative Director. A guy with a high school education. Doesn’t have a traditional background. Embraces change. And stirs things up.
At EA - people make games and they like to play games.
Cartels and Cutthroats – an economic simulation game – at their company retreat they had a tournament.
EA University Knowledge Changes Everything
Producers and designers – at EA – the business is so unique. Have spent a lot of time to invest in those capabilities.
Creative Directors Accelerator
creative director is like the director of a movie – they only have about 20 creative directors at EA. Needed to invest in most senior designers. Year long program. Meet once a quarter. Run through a specific curriculum. Specific report cards. Training built out of training in a really structured way.
Built an exercise around Lego Mindstorms
In his classes – need to learn about leadership and teamwork. So create games that use computers in one component, but most of game built on human interaction.
Rapid iteration cycle
Lego Mindstorms – The Game:
In one day create a simulation of a 4 year product/platform lifecycle (game platforms change every 4 years – e.g., playstation 3 1/2.)
Complications:
Outcomes:
Some other games:
How we used to make games – really smart kids working on games until they think they are done…that doesn’t work anymore!
Now have bigger teams – so higher costs – lower margins.
Can’t say “I’ll know when it’s done” anymore…
Have changed leadership strategies –Why was it failing? Because they are guessing about what people are telling them.
The problem is…PEOPLE LIE. (They don’t mean to.) But their actions don’t.
Every online game played in John Madden for the past year phones home…it reports button presses, the timing, lots of detailed information.
The data showed that madden 10 had a kicking problem – their telemetry showed it. A playing mechanic for kicking that didn’t work. Took data from those reports, showed video tape of person playing…
This kind of process (telemetry based analysis) – changes everything you do as a designer.
Google – semantic analysis – take text that you have typed and try to make sense of it. Problem with that…people lie.
Amazon - -thinks about what you do. Mining your previous choices and correlating that to other customers (based on actions – not what you say).
Stop guess, start measuring!
Example of using technology in a more traditional education environment (teaching kids how to spell better, improve vocabulary).
Telemetry based Developement Programs
People lie – don’t trust, don’t guess. Their actions don’t.
Find metrics to measure. align metrics of personl progress with indicators of enterprise success (OUTCOMES)
Communicate progress and value through scoreboards of those metrics – when the metric matters to people they obsess on it and it improves their performance.
(Prius is first video game car – it comes with a high score!)
Bottom line – people lie – so need to measure on objective metrics.
Q&A:
Sim City source code is now open source! Can be used for educational
Why games become social – we love playing with human beings – more challenging and interesting than playing against a computer
What tools can corporates use to incorporate gaming (“I know a lot of tools, but it’ll take you 3 years to figure out how to use them!”)
Sims – 25% of game market and primarily women. This year women took over the video game business!
Products like Instant Action (simplified game engine, Seashark – need to be a programmer ), Flash! We still haven’t figured out how to make this easy.
Tools like Google Analytics can be used to measure your Flash…
(Q&A session still going…I’m off to the Expo – booth babe duty!)
Join me on the Expo floor Wednesday and Thursday.
Just stop by Kineo Booth #407 and say hi.
I’ll perform showtunes by request and talk eLearning shop talk by default.
This past week, I spent Monday and Tuesday at the ASTD International Conference & Expo in DC. Not attending sessions, mind you, but working the Kineo booth and fine-tuning my schmoozing super powers.
My first impressions of ASTD: ‘wow, what a huge conference’ and ‘wow, these are traditional training people for whom most of this eLearning stuff is kind of exotic and/or quite overwhelming and threatening.’ There were over 350 booths selling their wares: from “are you a squiggle, a circle, or a box?”people to big LMS companies to leadership/management classroom trainers up the wazoo.
From Kineo, Steve Rayson and Mark Harrison from the UK office were there, along with my new US boss, Steve Lowenthal. It’s nice to meet people for the first time and give them hugs. Especially the people you work with.
At the show, we talked to a lot of people about Moodle and Articulate. Could see lots of light bulbs going off in people’s heads as they viewed our demos and heard about pricing options for Moodles. More on that later, but I do see us at a Tipping Point with the Corporate Moodle.
But more important than all that, and what you, my fellow bloggers/twitterers will be most interested in, are all the cool bloggers/tweeple I got to meet face to face!
Wendy Wickham. We went for a walk and had coffee. Jealous? I know you are. We talked about some of the sessions she attended (go read her blog for all the news).
Clark Quinn. He’s with me on the impending Moodle explosion. Clark, I’m sorry I missed you at the beer meetup. I got there too late!
Kevin Thorn. He’s the guy who does really cool cartoons. Also one of the nicest human beings on the planet.
Mark Britz. Turns out to be one of the nicest human beings on the planet.
Dave Ferguson. When I finally made my way to the Monday night Beer & Bloggers session at Fado, Dave was the only one left from the crowd I had hoped to mingle with. Dave was regaling some Germans in the corner with amazing stories and singing the Liechtenstein National Anthem with great gusto. Then we sat down and talked about “Ten Steps to Complex Learning.” What an amazing human being. Too bad I didn’t get a picture.
Marcia Connor. She arrived at the Beer & Bloggers session even later than I did, having just driven 2.5 hours to get to DC! And then she drove me to my hotel, for which I will be forever thankful.
The reason I missed most of the Beer & Bloggers session (after doing my best to get it organized), is that the crew from Articulate took Kineo out to dinner at Clyde’s. I sat next to the very famous Tom Kuhlman and talked about everything from the amazing Articulate community to home schooling and virtual office worker issues to passports. (Tom, my passport just arrived in the mail yesterday!)
The Articulate booth was just around the corner from us and there was always a big crowd listening in to Tom’s sessions. This company really cares about helping people create better eLearning with their products. Thanks to Mark Schwartz, Articulate CEO, for the great meal.
I wished I’d had more time as I missed some key people I would have loved to have connected with:
Robert Kennedy (Robert stopped by the Kineo booth on Tuesday while I was at a client meeting.)
Craig Wiggins (he came to crash the Beer & Bloggers party. So bummed we didn’t meet!)
I returned to Massachusetts late Tuesday night after having a great dinner with my brother, visiting my Dad’s grave at Arlington National Cemetery and seeing my cousin’s two-week old baby.
What a two days! And that was just the beginning of the week. I’m still bleary, but invigorated.
