Comments on: ASTD TechKnowledge 2008: Postmortem

By: eLearning DevCon 2009 Event Recap | eQuixotic

eLearning DevCon 2009 Event Recap | eQuixotic — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 03:44:22 +0000

[...] night was excellent and the keynote speakers were superb. No, they didn’t have David Pogue (ASTD TechKnowledge 2008), but then David Pogue didn’t really have anything to say about [...]

By: Mark

Mark — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 20:14:21 +0000

Nice post. The majority of conferences are, for the most part, a waste of time and money. I always seem way disappointed with 90% of the sessions. And the keynotes….ugh – at least you have the discipline to actually attend them. The only good thing about conferences is the occasional tip one might stumble upon in a session where they got lucky and the presenter is not staying high-level and stating the glaringly obvious.

I haven’t been to an ASTD conference in about 6 years because the 3 I went to prior to that were pretty much all wastes of time. The best conference I went to was the Elearning Guild’s Flash Developer conference back in ‘04. The majority of the sessions sucked but the people there were not just SWF2EXE authors but real flash developers/designers, and the number of attendees was small enough that everyone got to mingle fairly extensively. Macromedia had a very good presence there as well.

A couple of years ago I attended the “Elearning DevCon” conference by the Rapid Intake company (the Unison guys you mention) and that was by far the most disappointing. It was plugged as ‘by developers for developers’, yet everyone I spoke with seemed to be ‘developing’ with powerpoint!

By: Chris

Chris — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 18:28:55 +0000

Hey Clark, sorry I didn’t catch any of your sessions this year. I saw you in passing several times and should have said “Hi.”

I caught one of your sessions last year and really enjoyed it.

By: Paul

Paul — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 18:05:47 +0000

Hello, found you through Tony’s conference writeup.

I say, in addition to pressing Adobe for Mac versions of their applications, push Adobe to make an elearning package much the way they have marketing, video, and web packages to buy. I can’t tell you how much it grinds my gears they don’t package the Presenter plugin and Captivate 3 with Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, etc. To me it seems such an obvious market to play to.

By: Quinnovate

Quinnovate — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 18:02:49 +0000

Chris, the problem with the last day is, people leave half way through to go home. If you had a full day of stuff, people would still leave half way through. If you have half a day, half the people leave the day before. What do you do?

Speaking as a (now finished) member of the program committee, we wanted a closing speaker that would help cap off the conference, and give a reason to stick around. Speaking as an individual, the committee didn’t have a voice in who it was, and I’m with you that the ‘up with people’ approach wasn’t a good choice. Now, if we’d *closed* with a David Pogue…

By: Scott_S

Scott_S — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 10:58:18 +0000

Chris,

Thanks for the update from the conference. We can’t attend all of them so it’s great to get an update on what we missed.

Keep pushing Articulate, Adobe, and Techsmith to come out with Mac versions. After making the switch back in December, all I can say is Oh My! It’s such a better machine. The more e-learning software that can be developed for the Mac is only going to help us create solutions for all those PC users.

I look forward to future posts on your conference takeaways.

You can skip the day 3 stuff

By: Sue Massey

Sue Massey — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 06:00:39 +0000

I found your site on google blog search and read a few of your other posts. Keep up the good work. Just added your RSS feed to my feed reader. Look forward to reading more from you.

- Sue.