eLearning Weekly

Day 1 of AG08 was busy and completely wore me out - but it was all worth it! The day started with an early discussion at one the Breakfast Byte sessions and ended with dinner at Wolfgang Puck’s restaurant with some great newfound friends.

Here are the sessions I attended:

• Positioning your Careers in Social Networking and Collaborative Learning (Ray Jimenez)
• Learning 2.0: Harnessing the Potential of Contextual Informal Learning (Janhavi Padture)
• Mobile Learning Today and Tomorrow (Judy Brown)
• (Briefly attended) Tips & Tricks for Adobe Captivate and Presenter (Silke Fleischer)
• (Briefly attended) Storyboarding for e-Learning Video Production (Steve Haskin)

Here a quick wrap-up of the various thoughts I picked up throughout the day:

• Keith Sawyer’s opening keynote was pretty good, but I think many of us were expecting more specifics. He discussed innovation and how we can better hone collaboration efforts to be more innovative. Much of his discussion covered high-level education concepts that I think many instructional designers have mastered. I wished we could’ve seen more examples or heard more tips for applying this to our organizations. Still, it was pretty good. And he is a professor at Washington University in St. Louis (not too far from where I grew up ).
• I twittered about this, but I get the feeling that the overall world of eLearning is shifting more toward learning and performance, with technology in the back seat. We’re no longer as thrilled and ecstatic over the latest tools. We’re now looking more closely to see how tools can better help us achieve our goals. And we realize that technology won’t solve every problem. I think eLearning is maturing, in a good way.
• I found out there’s an Enterprise version of Facebook. Interesting. I know many companies are interested in Facebook, but are afraid to let their employee data outside of their firewall. If the enterprise edition can be installed locally, I think this’ll interest many people. (Note: I didn’t have time to verify or research this, so take it with a grain of salt for now.)
• Many people are wondering if the LMS is dead, or will die soon. I think the role of the LMS will shift to become less important in the next few years, as people realize the value of social learning tools, such as wikis, tagging, social bookmarking, blogging, etc. We’ll probably have LMSs around forever to track important training, such as compliance, legal, and safety training. Legal departments have to have that information somewhere.
• I visited with Judy Brown and David Metcalf. They’re both doing great things with mLearning, and I would love to somehow work with them. Judy has many of her presentations posted on her web site. Great stuff!
• One interesting note related to mLearning: People will scroll vertically on their mobile devices, but they hate to scroll side-to-side. Simple observation, but impactful. Need to keep that in mind… Also, check out this mLearning page validator: mr.dev.mobi.
• I keep running into Mark Chrisman of the badsquare blog. We’ve yet to sit down and have a good conversation. I’m hoping we can meet up soon.

(Don’t forget - I’m micro-blogging about the conference on Twitter…)

I’ve seen several articles over the past few months about online reputations, and why it is important for you to always be aware of how you are represented on the web. Michele Martin over at The Bamboo Project Blog has a great post titled With Web 2.0, You Can Run, But You Can’t Hide: Tools and Resources for Managing Your Online Reputation. The main idea is that you should be increasingly more aware of how you represent your self, both personally and professionally, on the web. It’s becoming easier and easier for people and companies to track down every last thing you’ve done; anonymity is becoming a thing of the past.

I especially wanted to call attention to Michele’s post because she links to some excellent resources toward the bottom of the page, and this is a great place to catch up on the subject if you’re not familiar with it.

So why is this important to us in the field of eLearning / learning and technology? I see two main reasons:

First, it’s important for you to build-up and monitor your own online reputation, from a professional development standpoint. You know, double-check that you don’t have too many crazy party pictures on Flickr. It’ll help your credibility and your career down the line. And participate more with professionals in your industry. Blogging has helped me tremendously; it is a huge part of my online reputation.

Second, we are in the field of professional development. We look for ways to help people learn. We help them build their knowledge and increase their understanding. I think it’s helpful to make people aware of how important their online reputation has become and explain why it is important. You can also use this time to encourage ways they can build their reputations online. For example, you may recommend they participate more with their industry (ex. professional societies), write articles, blog, etc. As noted in Michele’s post, with your online reputation, "You have to be on top of your game because if you aren’t, then people will know it. You have to keep learning, because if you don’t, your outdated skills will show."

(And one last time - make sure you check out Michele’s post!)