We enjoyed many conversations with very friendly fellow delegates, and would reflect on a number of trends, but this is by no means a representative sample.
Several delegates where on what would be best described as reconnaissance missions, coming to find out about e-learning, as there organisation or department had yet to start to use e-learning.
The term e-learning seems to be the accepted parlance for a wide range of undefined learning technologies and learning content somehow moderated by technologies various, but as a term it still seems to work, after all this event is organised by the Elearning Guild.
Many of the practitioners using e-learning in their organisations were still struggling for influence and acceptance within the corporate hierarchy. The e-learning community is often found as an adjunct of IT/IS, or HR or L&D or OD or even marketing in different organisations. Our challenge is to be able to influence all these different groups.
To get a real feel of what is being developed in the US visit the Demofest part of the Devlearn site, our favourite was” I Need to Level up! Gamification in Action” on the new Social Learning platform, Curatr. The platform was built by HT2, in conjunction with Warwick University in the U.K (could this be why?)
Devlearn in summary, – a really well organised and well put together event, The Aria conference (convention) centre is very good indeed. I am not quite so enamoured by the Aria Resort though!
What do we take away from all this….well we got a really well informed view of the future, the chance to see lots of really good and innovative developers of e-learning and learning technologies, really good key note speeches and mix with a great group of learning practitioners.
