Phew, 4 conferences in three weeks! First DevLearn, then Colombia’s eLearning 07, and now the Danish Research Network’s conference, with a quick presentation over to George Siemen’s Corporate Learning (CLTI) conference via Elluminate. Some mixed thoughts about what’s happened…
I’ll give my first presentation here in Denmark in a couple of hours. I’m doing like I did in Abu Dhabi and on ITFORUM, trying to give a ‘big picture’ talk using wisdom as guidance for looking at what we do, though there’s a followup session where I delve into associated models and examples. Tomorrow I’m talking a couple of hours on game and mobile design. At DevLearn I talked about the roles of elearning tools, mobile learning, and the emotional component of elearning. In Colombia it was the corporate strategy, as well as my mobile and game design workshops. For CLTI, again it was the corporate elearning strategy.
Denmark’s lovely, by the way. OK, it’s overcast and cold, but the people are warm, and the conference center is absolutely nice. The rooms are simple (single bed) but well appointed, though with quirky internet. However, the center has great internet connection, very good food, and is well outfitted with lots of space for talking, too. I found out that English is almost an official second language here (if you immigrate, if you don’t speak good enough Danish, English is an acceptable second!), and I have no worries about talking to anyone. Thanks to Helle for her help here.
Whereas in Colombia, the odds were I couldn’t talk to anyone unless I had one of my translators along. Of course, they didn’t recommend going anywhere alone anyway! Except the mall connected to the hotel, where I spent an hour madly searching for some things to take home to the family before it closed. Colombia had good food too, but the workshops at Sena were somewhat disorganized. The conference center was nice, but the government building for the workshops had some problems.
We started late, the technology didn’t work (we even had a power outage), and the room was open onto a 10 story stairwell for some poor acoustics. Anyone talking even a bit was heard everywhere! They kept changing the plan and times for things, so it was just make it up as you go along. For the mobile workshop, I didn’t end up doing too much activity (200 people is a bit much for a workshop), but the game design workshop came off fairly well (they dropped it to 40, and it was down to 12 at the end because people had to go catch their flights home!). The simultaneous translation wasn’t as much of a barrier as I feared, though it got difficult to deal with questions. I really owe a debt of thanks to Nikolaos who made things go as smoothly as they did (and he had no power over the workshop arrangements)
And, in all fairness, I saw ways to improve the mobile workshop as it’s a bit conceptual and could use more hands-on. No worries, that I can do. And I’m always tweaking things to go better anyway.
I’m still waiting for my learning thoughts to coalesce, but I really do feel there’s a movement towards strategy out there. Hopefully!
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