eLearning DevCon 2009 Event Recap

June 29, 2009

First, allow me to apologize to any readers for my 3 month unintended hiatus. I’ve been stretching my creative wings with some eLearning development side work, and what I can say – there are only so many hours in the day. My “hobby” time used to accommodate my blogging. Now my “hobby” time has become “more work” time. Not sure how I’m feeling about that. I am learning that “moonlighting” means “less sleep.” Ah, I was so naive…

A couple of weeks ago I attended eLearning DevCon 2009 in beautiful Salt Lake City, Utah (the state I am proud to call home). This yearly conference is organized and hosted by Garin Hess and the fine folks at Rapid Intake. Hopefully some of you attended as well. I know one eQuixotic reader did – I know because she “outed” me as a blogger in front of my coworkers. So much for the ability to criticize one’s organization in anonymity. (I forgive you, Tamara!) That said, it’s thrilling to meet a reader at all. Blogging can give you the feeling of talking to oneself alone in the wilderness. It’s nice to know someone out there actually reads your words and can relate to you, if only in distant silence.

Typically the weather in Utah is hot by the end of June. Not so this year. It was beautiful. And the setting is my favorite of any conference I’ve ever attended: historic Fort Douglas on the gorgeous University of Utah campus.

Ambling between buildings on a college campus for workshops is far more enjoyable than shuffling from meeting room to meeting room in some bland hotel or conference center. And being on-campus during the summer, we found ourselves surrounded by kids attending football, basketball and soccer camps. Another refreshing change from the typical professional conference. Ah, the energy of youth! Truly invigorating.

This conference provides all meals onsite. Sure, it’s typical university cafeteria fare, but at least we didn’t have to scurry offsite to find places to eat. The catered dinner the first 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 eLearning.

The development-centric approach of eLearning DevCon really appeals to me. I personally have little patience for highbrow abstract academic talk about eLearning (and buzzword gobbledegook) that plagues many conferences of this nature. It’s one thing to talk about good eLearning, it’s another thing entirely to actually create it. And from my perspective, many of those who like to talk about it aren’t typically very good at creating it. Me, I want to create good eLearning. So this conference’s concentration on development works for me.

The quality of the sessions was hit and miss, as it always is at conferences of this nature. That said, I was pleased with all but a couple of my sessions. In contrast, at some other conferences I’ve attended I was lucky to get a couple of good sessions – the rest seemed a terrible waste of time.

I would recommend that the eLearning DevCon folks (as well as folks coordinating other conferences) do a better job of screening their presenters. In my view a presenter can’t be poor, mediocre, or even competent at the topics they are presenting. They must be exceptional. Otherwise they have nothing of value to share. If you are, say, presenting on eLearning visual design and the quality of your own visual design is…ahem…questionable, you’ve wasted my time (and money). I want to be inspired.

The presentation skills also varied wildly, from one presenter who read the presentation in its entirety from a script (Ugh!) to a presenter who had no idea what to say at all and leaned on the audience to do the talking. But those were the outliers. Most of the presenters in my sessions were excellent. A couple really stood out.

Sarah Williams (of inContact) presented a session entitled The Missing Link: Rehumanizing eLearning. Sharp, engaging, with a razor wit and a beautiful PowerPoint presentation – Sarah demonstrated exactly what a workshop should be. In fact, this is what eLearning should be. We would do very well indeed to emulate Sarah Williams in our eLearning courses. Her presentation was so good that I’ll forgive her for mentioning text-to-speech tools (Ack!) and, even worse, those horrific 3D human avatars that try (and fail) to mouth your written words. There’s nothing “human” about either of those tools and both should be shunned with extreme prejudice. Those two missteps aside, I thoroughly enjoyed this session.

I attended several sessions by Nick Floro of Sealworks Interactive Studios. I had the pleasure of hearing Nick at the last eLearning DevCon and he was fantastic at both events. His eLearning work is beautiful, as I mentioned in an earlier post.

The folks at Rapid Intake would be wise to give full tenure to Sarah Williams and Nick Floro for future events.

I also really enjoyed the session by Tamara Barbosa (esteemed eQuixotic reader – shout out!) of Ideas Designed Group on using Captivate for simulations in synchronous training events. I only wish we were using Adobe Connect for our synchronous training so we could incorporate Captivate in the way she demonstrated.

I attended several other excellent sessions as well. If only the participants had equaled that level of excellence.

It is always disheartening to see that we, as a community of training professionals, display the same frustrating behaviors as our oft-maligned learners. You know, the behaviors we’re always complaining about and endlessly seeking to stamp out? Wandering into sessions late and leaving early. Sitting in the back row of a half-empty room, forcing the presenter to shout and killing any hope of worthwhile dialog. Working email on laptops and Blackberrys. A guy in front of me in one session actually watched fullscreen ESPN on his laptop during the presentation! Try paying attention to the topic at hand when you have a live TV directly in your field of view. I’m sure his employer would have been impressed (unless his employer was ESPN, in which case they probably would have been impressed).

Me, I was not very impressed at all with the majority of my fellow participants. Frankly, I’ve seen more enthusiastic participation in high school classes than I saw in most of my sessions. Yet we wonder why we can’t get our learners to focus on our eLearning courses? Really???

Gripes aside, this was the best eLearning conference I’ve yet attended, and a big improvement over eLearning DevCon 2007 (I did not attend in 2008). I also preferred this conference to ASTD TechKnowledge, despite the lack of industry “big names” that conferences like TechKnowledge provide.

I hope to attend DevCon 2010. I highly suggest you check this conference out. Maybe I’ll see you there next year! Utah would love to have you!

Posted in eLearning Design