Learning Through Social Media

Friday was the last day of the conference. Marcia Conner (who I am interning for at Pistachio Consulting this semester) had asked if I wanted to participate on a panel about learning through social media, and this is actually why I came to the conference. Besides Marcia and myself, Koreen Olbrish and Mark Oehlert were on the panel.

To start off the session, Marcia spoke a bit about what social media is, and what social learning is. Then we broke the room into four sections, since there are four of us, and got everyone to talk about what they do now to facilitate learning with social media. We sat at the tables with everyone and answered questions and tried to act as mentors.

That session went really fast.

New Skills for Instructional Designers

I tried a couple of other sessions before I came back to this session. I forgot that Ellen Wagner had promised to do a Pecha Kucha, and I walked in on the very end of it. I am very sad about that.

Ellen, Cammy Bean, and Koreen Olbrish presented on the skills instructional designers need today. I didn’t take notes (I was actually multi-tasking – listening and doing work email). They talked about how these days instructional designers need to understand educational design, technical design, and business design.

This really reinforced how lucky I’ve been in my career in education. I started as a trainer, and then became a instructional developer, at a company that also expected me to be a technical SME. The systems approach at FSU gave me the education to start looking at things from a higher business level, and my new position has started to give me the practical experience I was looking for in that area.

Keynote

The Keynote was “365 Days From Now: Preparing for the Change Ahead” was given by Leonard Brody (no website or blog? Seriously??).

I did not like this keynote address at all. It was all I could do to hold myself back from standing up and calling BS. In fact, I think this session deserves its own post.