I was fortunate enough to go to the eLearning Guild’s Learning Solutions conference this year. I met lots of people – many for the first time in real life – but I’m going to talk about the people I met in a different post. I was going to put the entire wrap-up on one post, but it got too long. So here is the Wed wrap-up.

Breakfast Byte

This was the only day I went to a Breakfast Byte discussion. I sat in on Talking Shop about Learning Theories which was led by Cammy Bean. I got to talk about Mayers and his multimedia design principles. I couldn’t believe that either.

Keynote

The keynote was The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything by Sir Ken Robinson. He was a very engaging speaker. I agree with his main message – that to give our best, we should work in an area for which we have a natural talent and you should practice what you love. But this voice in the back of my head keeps nagging me – that’s fine if you have the social and economic standing and family situation to do that. What about everyone else? That voice got very loud towards the end of the conference.

Blending Informal Learning into your Formal eLearning

The session called Blending Informal Learning into your Formal eLearning was led by Bob Mosher. I really appreciated the references to what happened when eLearning started getting popular. Here were some of the main points I got:

• Learners own informal learning, but there is a difference between consuming learning and design
• The LMS puts an extra click between the performance need and learner consumption. We may need it for organizational reasons, but the extra click throws up a barrier to an individual reaching out for performance support. An LMS distances the learning from learning (e.g. log-in, search…).
• Performance support should be blended with the formal training event
• The best performance support is perceived by the learners to be part of the job
• Training people are great at building red shirts for people who want to by blue pants. Build to the need!
• Not all informal learning assets are digital. Think about cheat sheets, etc…
• A Performance Support broker (PS broker) is an over-arching system that helps a learner find info in the workflow, and makes it available in a particular order
• Create a learning asset analysis. This should include EVERYTHING that people use to learn, not just the formal assets in the LMS (e.g. user created and shared cheat sheets, experts that everyone talks to or emails, etc)

Assessing eLearning Results: Fundamentals, Myths, and Special Opportunities

This session was lead by Will Thalheimer. I already believed that smile sheets really don’t tell us much. The most interesting point for me is how measuring at the end of training doesn’t really tell us much either. Measuring at the end of training is a biased metric because studies have shown that people forget much of what they have learned in at most a week. Measuring during performance is much more telling.

And then I presented!

I headed over to the ID Zone to hear a presentation on Design Strategies for Leveraging Social Media for Learning, and there was some sort of issue with the speaker (ultimately he wasn’t there). I could not bear to watch my fellow New Englander Jean Marrapodi scramble in front of a packed group of people waiting to hear about social media and learning, especially when I had my laptop and the presentations I’ve been using internally.

So I did the EMC thing and volunteered on the spot to present. Of course my laptop then decided to act wonky, so I couldn’t get to my presentation (I posted a version of the slides after the fact). So I just talked about what we’ve started doing at EMC, and I showed everyone the Proven Professional Community using Jean’s teeny tiny laptop.

This was probably the craziest thing I’ve ever done. I didn’t even think about it, I just offered because of my social connections to Jean. Hopefully it was helpful for folks!

That’s all I did at the conference that day. Thursday and Friday posts coming soon