ASTD TechKnowledge 2008: Postmortem

March 2, 2008

ASTD TechKnowledge 2008 San Antonio is over. After having had a little time to think and reflect, here’s my overall review of the event.

I don’t know if the crummy facilities last year (the dusty, smelly, doomed Riviera Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas) soured my overall impression of TechKnowledge 2007, but TechKnowledge 2008 seemed to be a definite improvement in most areas (until Day 3 anyway – more on that in a moment). The facilities were infinitely better, the frequent meals provided by ASTD were a nice bonus, and the sessions seemed better organized and of higher quality. The opening keynote by David Pogue (I’m a big fan!), while not specifically related to eLearning, was energizing and highly entertaining. I felt his pain upon learning that his Apple laptop hard drive had crashed the morning of the event and he had to scramble to recreate his presentation in PowerPoint (ack!) on a borrowed Dell laptop (ack!). Once you’ve used Apple Keynote for presentations, you realize just how crude PowerPoint is in the visuals (and live delivery) department.

But Pogue managed to pull it off, sloppy substitute slideshow and all, capping off his speech with some wildly entertaining musical parodies. Gifted writer, singer, pianist, comedian, technology luminary – what can’t this guy do? I hate you, David Pogue.

My burning jealousy aside, it was a great start to the conference. Well done, ASTD.

The sessions were, as they always are at events like these, hit or miss, but I generally enjoyed the sessions I attended and found most to be of value.

Dr. Michael Allen of Allen Interactions was inspirational, as always. I agree 100% with his comment that 90% of eLearning should be thrown away. Amen, Dr. Allen. In fact, his bleak perspective on the state of eLearning today echoes my own, which provides the foundation for my blog.

Tom Kuhlmann of Articulate gave a great workshop on adding interactions within PowerPoint for publishing in Articulate Presenter. I love that application!

I also met Tony Karrer of TechEmpower and the eLearning Technology blog (hey, we both say tomayto!), who facilitated a discussion on Web 2.0 collaborative knowledge-sharing technologies. I would like desperately to implement wikis in my organization, but significant obstacles exist, including a particularly change-averse breed of IT Nazis and a management culture that is often hostile to the democratization of information.

Now for a personal rant. You’d think as adult professionals we’d have moved beyond the “sit on the back row like skulking teens” mentality. It’s silly to have a large room with people scattered throughout, where empty seats (mostly toward the front) are legion, yet with those at the back still complaining that they can’t hear. Shameless. It’s like freshman year 101 studies again. Bah.

The Adobe Captivate 3 workshop was a revelation for computer simulation training. I’ve used Camtasia plenty, but Captivate appears to greatly streamline the process of doing instructional screencasts, and the latest version includes some very impressive additions. I must procure a copy of this software. Which, in my organization, means at least a year of begging and groveling. Sigh.

Note to Adobe: TechSmith is working on a Mac version of Camtasia. Are you going to let them show you up, or are you going to conjure up a Mac version of Captivate?

In the exhibition area, I was extremely impressed with the Unison eLearning collaborative development tool by Rapid Intake. So impressed that I need to save my thoughts on what I saw of the product for a separate blog post. Stay tuned for that.

Sadly, the event ended with more whimper than bang, with a classic final-day conference letdown. Why do half of the participants always disappear before the final day of a conference? (Note to self: perhaps it’s because they already know about the classic final-day conference letdown?)

Both sessions I attended on the final day included extensive (and worthless) breakout group activities. Aaaarghhh! Why must conference presenters punish us like this? I didn’t fly all the way to San Antonio to learn how Jane Doe from Lake Okeefenokee School District storyboards her eLearning courses. I just didn’t. Is it too much to expect that the “experts” hired to present at these sessions actually be the ones teaching us something and not relying on us to teach ourselves?

Note (plea) to ASTD: if presenters plan to include significant group breakout activities in their session, please require that they warn us in the session description. So I can go elsewhere. I hate to sound harsh and unkind, but geez – can’t we move past these trite group activities already?

And talk about ending on a sour note: the closing keynote was attended by an embarrassingly small number of participants, scattered in pitifully tiny clusters throughout the large auditorium. The motivational speaker (?) caused a collective rolling of eyes (at least within my group) with hokey cliches and flowery platitudes about positive action. Ugh. I thought we were all going to be asked to link arms and sing or something. Frankly, I would have preferred watching a video of David Pogue’s opening keynote again.

To add insult to injury, we were hurried out of the auditorium with a thumping salute to yesteryear, Who Let the Dogs Out (sadly, I am not making this up). Bleh. Wouldn’t it have been easier (and less humiliating) for the emcee to just scream “Get out!” into the microphone?

Nevertheless, we got the message loud and clear and scurried back to our hotel rooms, shaking our heads and wondering how things went so wrong at the end. What a downer.

Did anyone else share my final-day malaise, or am I just being a Negative Nancy?

I’m still waiting for the iPhone unveiling at Macworld moment at one of these eLearning conferences. Something that makes me sit up and say “Whoa!” Perhaps that is too much to expect, but I’m clinging to the hope of seeing something truly game-changing one of these days.

So the conference for me was a mixed bag. Days one and two, thumbs up. Day three, thumbs down. Way down.

TechKnowledge 2009? I’ll have to think about it.

Sidenote: did I mention that midway through the conference, I received an email from our IT department informing me that my entire training website (my primary job is development and maintenance of our training website) had mysteriously disappeared completely from the server?!? If you were at the conference and heard a shriek of utter horror and misery on Wednesday morning, that was me. Sorry about that. Thank heaven for daily backups. And thank heaven IT actually followed their daily backup protocol. A pleasant surprise indeed. So if parts of this review appear to be a little cranky, well, perhaps that was the cause of it.

Actually, dealing with the website crisis over the phone allowed me to escape some of the breakout group activities and part of the concluding keynote. Hey, sometimes bad news can be good news!

Addendum: am I piling on to note that the closing keynote not only featured a pseudo breakout activity (ack!), but the handout featured a Screen Bean as well? Sigh.

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Posted in eLearning Design