Learning Technologies 2011: initial reactions

I have a semi-official job to do in respect of the recent Learning Technologies conference in that I have to collate the Twitter stream and the various blog posts into some kind of coherent report. It is going to be a fairly immersive task and I realise that it will change my perception of the event. So I have decided to set down my own, utterly subjective view of things before that happens.

As always, I noticed a significant disconnect between the conference upstairs and the exhibition downstairs. As someone put it during the post-event reflection yesterday evening: "the thought leaders are upstairs, looking at the future, while the vendors are downstairs, selling the past". Upstairs, people were saying 'content is a tyrant,' 'social is the way forward' and 'the LMS is dead', while downstairs, people were saying 'content is king' and (as Jane Bozarth put it) 'we've added social to our LMS'. Of course, the vendors will sell what the buyers want to buy. And the buyers don't know what they don't know, so they go with what they (think they) do know. Attending the free exhibition does not expose them to the messages coming out of the conference, which has a fairly significant price tag. I am increasingly convinced that we need to find a way to get the conference message to the exhibition attendees and will be putting some ideas forward to the organisers.

There were two themes that came out of the conference for me, both of which aligned with where my own head has been for a while.

Firstly, and fairly overwhelmingly, was the message that the value of failure has been hugely underestimated. We all know that we learn more from failure than from success. In fact, I paraphrased the key message of one speaker as 'the fear of failure is the enemy of success'. The problem is that L&D departments have been told that the whole point of us is that we are supposed to make sure that nobody fails. Ever. And when people do fail, we just know for a fact that it's going to be our fault, right? And some of us have only gone and believed this message. And so we've decided that we need to produce numbers to show what a difference we're making. And SCORM tracking to show that we did train them, but if they want to be stubborn/stupid/clumsy, well it's hardly our fault, now is it?

If people are punished for failing, the fear of failing will prevent them from 'having a go', from being creative, from exploring alternatives. I overheard one person saying that within Virgin, people are rewarded for having ideas and making suggestions...whether they work or not. Now that sort of culture engenders creativity. When people aren't afraid of, of.... and you know what? This is where my vocabulary leaves me in the lurch. What is it that follows failure in a culture that doesn't tolerate it? Do you get fired? Do you get laughed at? Do you get passed over for promotion or a salary increase? Well, whatever it is, it is clear that it needs to stop. People need to be encouraged to be brave, to be creative, to use their own initiative. Because it is these attitudes that will bring the results.

It is also these attitudes that are essential for an effective implementation of the other key theme, namely embedded learning. Increasingly, we are seeing people looking at ways to take the water to the horse, of putting the support where the people are. Mobile learning and social learning tools are part of the way that this can happen. They are the tools that help Joe Bloggs to go from the moment we call 'identifying a learning need' (and he calls 'oh hell, I can't remember how to do this') to finding a solution then and there, implementing it, and getting on with his life.

Picking up on the contrast between our name for that moment and Joe's name for it, another, less strident theme for me was speaking the language of the business. L&D needs to be aligned to the organisational business goals and express itself in those terms to the SMT/board. Intead of going in there half cocked with words like social learning and connectivism and twitter and all that malarkey, further convincing the decision makers that we are from some other breed who have no strategic advice to offer, we need to be expressing ourselves in terms of performance indicators and increased productivity and improved efficiency and such.

No doubt other bloggers will add their perceptions of both the conference and the exhibition, and I look forward to reading those. If you're one of them, please use the #lt11uk tag so that I can find yours.

Your very first conference?

I have been chatting to Don Taylor about the upcoming Learning Technologies conference. Via the wonder that is Twitter, I have discovered that some of my tweeps are coming along to what will be their very first conference and they're feeling a little apprehensive.

Of course, screeds of stuff has been written about conferences and how to make the most of them and and and, so this is just me adding my twopen'orth.

So many of us attend online events these days, even if it's just a tweetchat. So we've grown accustomed to swooping in for the designated hour or two and swooping back out again to return to life-as-usual (which may even involve going back to bed, if the time difference was unkind). Since the technology exists to attend conferences online, I would suggest that it is very important to home in on the value-added of a face to face event, and capitalise heavily on that.

You can attend presentations in an online conference. You can take part in the group-wide back channel text chat. Sometimes, you can fire off a private message to an individual attendee (depending on the platform being used and what the moderators are doing with it). You can raise questions.

But now you're travelling a few miles, or a few hundred miles. As well as your travel costs, you may be running up a travel and subsistence bill. You are also (if it isn't too indelicate of me to point it out) increasing your carbon footprint. So, I suggest, you put in a little effort to make it a worthwhile exercise.

So what can't you do (readily) online?

During/after sessions

• Introduce yourself to the people who sit on either side of you. Exchange business cards/v cards.
• Go up and introduce yourself to the speaker.
• Take note of the person who asks the question/shares the anecdote that resonates with you, and go and exchange business cards/v cards at the end of the session.
• Participate in the small group discussions. Don't deprive the rest of the group of your perspective - you might just provide someone's lightbulb moment.
• Ask questions/make observations. While you can do this online, my experience is that people are more reluctant to take the mike, and will make almost exclusive use of the back channel (although some find that distracting and disable it)
  

Use breaks/evenings to

• Put faces to names. Discover that the person you consider lofty and exalted is just human.
  
• Get eyeball to eyeball with the person/people with whom you've had a long running exchange of views online... or the person you've been following from afar (don't be shy, you may never get another chance).
• Hole up in a corner with a few people who face similar challenges to your own.
• Have a tweet up.
• Introduce yourself to presenters of sessions you're not attending. There is usually a speakers' room, so if they have work to do, they'll take refuge there - if they're in the common area, they're fair game. ;o)
• Go out for lunch with someone who can serve as a sounding board for your latest wacky idea.
• Take a stroll around the exhibition (if the conference coincides with one).
• Take in local sights - especially if you've travelled abroad - preferably with someone local.
  

I'm sure there are several more things you can do. But those are my 'starters for 10'. And if you're coming to Learning Technologies, come and find me and say hello!