What I Learned at DevLearn 2007

Wow, if you are in Training and Development, I’m here to tell you that this field is more exciting now that it has been in the 29 years I’ve been around it. Which, ok, is not saying much, since generally it has been about as exciting as your dining room furniture. But now we get to play with really cool stuff, and that’s what I want to talk about in this blog. Time to have fun people! And more importantly, to engage today’s learner and tomorrow’s learner.

Dude, What’s a DevLearn?

If you’re in the T&D field, and anyone asks, just pretend that you already know about the eLearning Guild and their annual conference, this year being DevLearn 2007. The Guild defines eLearning as “all educational or instructional content that is distributed using web-based technologies,” and exists as a community to further knowledge and practice in eLearning. If you have been laying awake nights wondering, “Where do the best brains in cutting edge training technology meet?”, then you may need to change your medication, but one good answer would be, at DevLearn.

One huge theme at DevLearn this year was collaborative learning and Web 2.0, which I will define later, but the idea being that knowledge should be shared. So, I’m sharing what I learned at DevLearn. At any given time there were generally 14 sessions going on, and since you could only attend one, you could only take in 7% of what was there. Soooo ... my posts will represent only one window into the whole thing, and I’m only presenting selected highlights of what I learned, since your attention span is probably already getting taxed. I’ll post stuff by topic so that it is easier to navigate and find things.