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What does the 20th year of the web mean?

23 January 2010 by Clark 2 Comments

Gina Minks, who I know only through Twitter (@gminks), tho’ hope to meet someday, tagged me for the following Questions from On. Her post was immensely personal, and I have no such deeply significant experience, but I have been on the internet since before there was one, so I reckon I can throw out a few ideas.

The questions are:

How has the Web changed your life?
How has the Web changed business and society?
What do you think the Web will look like in twenty years?

How has the web changed my life? Well, that’s an interesting question. Starting at the beginning, as an undergraduate I discovered computers and learning (I got a job managing the computer records for the office that coordinated tutoring on campus, after having been a tutor, and recognized that computers for learning was a keen idea). I managed to convince my Provost to let me design my own major, and hooked up with two brilliant academics: Hugh Mehan and James Levin, who let me be part of a study to conduct classroom discussion via email. This was circa 1978, but our university was on the ARPANet, and consequently we had networked computers and email. So I had an early taste of networking capabilities and it was seen as just part of the infrastructure.

After working in the real world for a couple of years (designing educational computer games), where I got a taste of PLATO (another networked environment), I went back to grad school, where we again had networks with email, and sometime during that period I discovered UseNet, a sort of topic-based discussion board, and became an active user. (This was before we had any idea this would be stored forever and become searchable, and movie reviews, recipes, and other such stuff I wrote back then can still be found!) It was a great way to get ask questions, share ideas, follow certain people.

So, when I moved to UNSW for an academic position following my postdoc, I’d met some Aussie surfers online before I went, and hooked up with them for some surf sessions when I got there. It was during that period that the web came out, following on initiatives like WAIS and Gopher that provided ways to store and find information on line.

The point is, when the HTTP protocol emerged, it wasn’t a big deal to me. I’d been immersed in a distributed digital information environment for years, and consequently one new protocol didn’t seem like that big a deal. So in a sense I really missed the sea-change that so many people felt, and pretty naturally took advantage of creating web pages, sites, and then online content.

One big change for me, however, accompanied a subsequent development, the CGI protocol. A student and I had developed a learning game for the Children’s Welfare Agency, and it was successfully distributed on floppy disks. When I found out about the CGI protocol, I realized this would allow maintaining (game) state, and that we could then play games on the internet. I had another student project port the game to the web. It may be old-fashioned now, but I’m thrilled that it still works, 15 years later!

Since then, the web has both been a source of employment, as a channel for designing learning solutions, and the more common infrastructure for life that others have discovered (info, commerce, collaboration). Along the way, in addition to the game, I’ve developed online conferences (back in 1996), an online learning competition (1997) streamlined online course (circa 1998), and an adaptive learning engine (1999-2000), all ahead of their time (for better and worse :). And the innovation continues.

How has the Web changed business and society? Here I don’t have much to say in addition to what’s been written by many. It’s provided an opportunity for information to reach more people, flattening hierarchies, breaking up information monopolies, and serving as a source for democratization.

Businesses have been able to dis-intermediate the market, cutting out middle-men. Internally, it has been possible for organizations to flatten the hierarchy, and work more effectively while distributed. Externally, companies are able to have richer dialogs with their customers and partners. It’s been less easy for companies to control information, as well, as the Cluetrain Manifesto and the 95 theses has alerted us to.

It’s also created new businesses and business models. Web 1.0, producer generated content, had some impact, and I’ve argued that Web 2.0 is about user-generated content, has created new opportunities. Web 3.0 will be even more interesting, with capabilities of delivering custom information and capabilities. Which leads me to the last question:

What do you think the Web will look like in twenty years? I really think that the web will have become transparent. For most of us, the information access capabilities will be transparent: so ubiquitous we take it for granted. There just will be information wherever and whenever you want it. We’ll be surrounded by clouds that follow us that define who we are and where we’re at both physically, chronologically, and metaphorically, so that information will be available on demand in whatever ways we want.

From the production side, we’ll be creating information by our actions that will be aggregated and mined for useful ways to serve us. We’ll have new models of learning that integrate across technologies and space to develop us in meaningful ways to empower us to achieve the goal we want. And, most likely and unfortunately, there will be information to continue to try to sway us to do things that others would prefer we do. I would hope, however, that we’re moving in a positive direction where we slow down our progress to the point we can make sure we’re bringing everybody along.

The opportunities are huge and potentially transformative, we just have to marshal the social will.

Finally, I’m supposed to tag two people to continue this chain letter. My colleague Jay Cross has talked before about how the internet changed his life and it’s a great story, so I’ll suborn him here. I’ll also ping another colleague who you should know about, Jim Schuyler, who shared several of the journeys I mentioned above.

Kapp & Driscoll nail Learning in 3D

13 January 2010 by Clark 2 Comments

Karl Kapp and Tony O‘Driscoll have launched the age of virtual worlds in organizational learning by providing a thorough overview in their new book Learning in 3D. This is a comprehensive and eloquent book, covering the emerging opportunity in virtual worlds. Replete with conceptual models to provide structure to the discussion as well as pragmatic guidance to how to design and implement learning solutions, this book will help those trying to both get their minds around the possibilities and those who are ready to get their hands dirty.

Their enthusiasm for the opportunities is palpable, and helps bolster the reader through some initial heady material. The book is eloquently written, as you‘d expect from two academics, but both also play in the real world, so it‘s not too esoteric in language or concept. It‘s just that the concepts are complex, and they don‘t pander with overly simplistic presentations. They get it, and want you to, too.

Their opening chapters make a solid argument for social learning. They take us through the changes society is going through and the technology transformations of the internet to help us understand why social learning, formal and informal, is a powerful case. They point out the problems with existing formal learning, and identify how these can be addressed in virtual worlds.

What follows is a serious statement of the essential components of a virtual world for organizational learning, a series of models that attempt to capture and categorize learning in a 3D world. They similarly develop a series of useful â€˜use cases‘ (they term them “archetypesâ€), and place them in context. Overall, it‘s a well thought out characterization of the space.

Coupled with the conceptual overviews are pragmatic support. There are a number of carefully detailed examples that help learners understand the business need and the outcomes as well as the design. There are war stories from a number of pioneers in the space. There is a systematic guide to design that should provide valuable support to readers who are eager to experiment, and the advice on vendors, adoption, and implementation is very practical and valuable.

The book is not without flaws: they set up a â€˜straw man‘ contrast to virtual world learning. While all too representative of corporate elearning, the contrast of good pedagogy versus bad pedagogy undermines the unique affordances of the virtual world. I note that their principles for virtual world learning design are not unique to virtual worlds, and are essentially no different (except socially) from those in Engaging Learning. And their 7 sensibilities doesn‘t seem quite as conceptually accurate as my own take on virtual world affordances. But these are small concerns in the larger picture of communicating the opportunities.

This is a valuable book for those who want to understand what all the excitement is about in virtual worlds. I‘ve been watching the space for a number of years now, and as the technology has matured have moved from thinking that the overhead was too high to where I believe that it is a valuable tool in the learning arsenal and only going to be more so. This book is the guide you need to being ready to capitalize on this opportunity. You can get a 20% discount purchasing it directly from Amazon. Recommended.

Content Models and Mobile Delivery

21 December 2009 by Clark 1 Comment

On Friday, I had the pleasure of a conversation of Kris Rockwell, CEO of Hybrid Learning for my in-process mobile learning book. I’d sought him out because of how he was developing mobile. Using content models to separate out the content from how it gets rendered for display, he’s creating more flexibility across devices. This combines two of my passions, and is part of a performance ecosystem strategy.

Hybrid uses DITA, a standard for wrapping definition around content, to develop their content. He presented powerful arguments to use this open source topic-based approach. For one, being open source, you’re not locked in to a proprietary format, yet backed by IBM it’s well supported. Second, it’s lightweight, compared to say S1000D (which I hadn’t heard of). And, of course, it’s portable across systems, meaning your solution doesn’t die even if your vendor does!

The use of a specification for such description around the content being developed is something I argue for regardless of mobile delivery or not. When you wrap more rigor, and more semantic granularity around your development process, you’re well on your way to an organized content governance process. For instance, if you design into a template even for the quick one-off requests that often come through the door in learning units, you are more likely to be able to reuse that content elsewhere, and, conversely, draw upon available content to shorten the development time. Done properly, the if you update the source one place, the changes should propagate throughout the relevant content! There are lots of cost efficiencies being found in documentation with this approach, and it should percolate into elearning as well.

What Kris is also finding, however, is a real advantage in content portability across mobile devices. Content so developed can easily be re-rendered for different devices, if they don’t already have the capability to hand. He argues convincingly that designing for a device is a bad approach, and designing for device-independent delivery gives you the power not only to hit more platforms but also more flexibility for new platforms that emerge. In short, your content development costs are amortized across more delivery options and ‘future-proofed’.

There was a lot more of interest in the conversation, including layered exploration (a “drill down” navigation style) and the potential for ordinary cell phones (dumbphones) to be viable delivers of instruction. But that’s a topic for another day. The take home for today, however, is think content models as well as mobile.

Distributed Thinking & Learning

1 December 2009 by Clark 2 Comments

A post I was pointed to reviews a chapter distributed thinking, a topic I like from my days getting to work with Ed Hutchins and his work on Distributed Cognition. It’s a topic I spoke about at DevLearn, and recently wrote about. The chapter is by David Perkins, one of premier thinkers on thinking, and I like several things he says.

For one, he says: “typical psychological and educational practices treat the person in a way that is much closer to person-soloâ€. I think that’s spot-on, we don’t tend to train for, and design for, the augmented human, and yet we know from situated cognition and distributed cognition that much of the problem solving we do is augmented in many ways, from pencil and paper, to calculators, references, and mobile devices.

I also like his separation of task solving from executive function, where executive function is the searching, sequencing, etc of the underlying domain-specific tasks, and how he notes that just because you create an environment that requires executive functioning, it doesn’t mean the learner will be able to develop those skills. “In general, cognitive opportunities are not in themselves cognitive scaffolds.” So treat all those so-called ‘edutainment’ games that claim to develop problem-solving skills with great care; they may require it, but there’s little effort I’ve seen that they actually develop it.

The implication is that having kids solve problems with executive support, but without scaffolding that executive support and the gradual release of those executive skills to the learner, we’re not really developing appropriate problem-solving skills. We don’t talk explicitly about them, and consequently leave the acquisition of those skills to chance. If we don’t put 21st century skills into our courses, K12, higher ed, and organizational, we’re not really developing our performers.

And that, at the end of the day, is what we need to be doing. So, start thinking a bit broader, and deeper, about learning and the components thereof, and produce better learning, learners, and ultimately the outcome performance.

Social and Semantic Web

4 November 2009 by Clark 2 Comments

Yesterday I attended the Social Web incubator Bar Camp of the W3C, focusing on issues in web support for social media. It was a small group, overall, but an interesting group, including folks keen on issues like technical underpinnings (discussion of FOAF, RDF, etc), and folks with an interest in more applied topics like enterprise, health, and journalism.

The issue on the table is what sorts of standards might be necessary or desirable to support social networking on the web in interoperable ways. One statement that resonated was a comparison between the social web and social networks as being analogous to open space versus silos. As a general rule, if someone can lock you into their proprietary approach, you are subject to their whims. If, instead, there are open standards, you’re free to approach things in different ways. For example, email took off once one email standard took hold and allowed different systems to interoperate. On the other hand, proprietary standards may provide the capital and motivation necessary to invest in the development of advanced features (e.g. the ability of Linden Labs to continue to expand Second Life capabilities as they grabbed market share).

The internet as an open standard (e.g.TCP/IP) has allowed for the development of other standards on top. If not for the http standard, we wouldn’t have have the world wide web. However, continued development is needed to meet new needs. So, for example the Salmon project was represented, which is trying to make a mechanism whereby any comment on a piece of web content, regardless of location and tool (e.g. blogging about someone’s Flickr picture) could be aggregated back to the original content to maintain the discussion.

This can be real propeller-head stuff, e.g. it was admitted that RDF’s uptake has been hampered by a difficult syntax. Even Sir Tim Berners-Lee, responsible for the http protocol, admits that the // in the protocol isn’t necessary, and regrets it. I no longer can get down in the weeds, but fortunately understand it well enough conceptually to talk intelligently about the requirements and see the opportunities.

And opportunities there are. The next generation, I believe, so-called web 3.0, is when we move to system-generated content. The discussions that occurred on pulling together useful information to the benefit of organizations, like adding valuable information as a response to your searches and discussions. Rules operating on data by description has powerful capabilities, e.g. the way Amazon provides mass customization. There are entailments, of course; taxonomies and ontologies need governance as do other content activities.

Naturally, some of it was more approachable than the geek speak, such as the fact that social engineering was as important as semantic engineering, for example that clever interface design can mitigate getting users to tag content. Similarly, problems that can arise from bad behavior may be better solved as cultural issues rather than technical ones.

The folks there were fabulously knowledge, for example a post-meeting request for ontologies around project management and pharmaceuticals were richly answered. While much of this stuff is still in development, the opportunities are coming, and having the necessary understanding on hand to capitalize on it is important. Note that these people are working to make this stuff work for all of us. Truly valuable and much to be appreciated.

My recommendation is to be aware of the possibilities and requirements. While you are likely not quite ready to take advantage of it (and there are already opportunities, seriously), you don’t want to do anything that would subsequently make the opportunities harder to capitalize on. So look into your content data engineering from a semantic point of view as well, and prepare for some truly awesome capabilities.

Extremophiles & Organizational Agility

30 October 2009 by Clark Leave a Comment

A number of years ago, I co-wrote a chapter with Eileen Clegg called The Agility Factor, that appeared in Marcia Conner & James Clawson’s excellent collection of organizational culture articles in the book Creating a Learning Culture. The focus of the book was on empowering organizations to be nimble in a context of increasing change.

Eileen’s husband is a marine scientist studying deep sea vents and the creatures that live there. In biology, organisms that can live in such extreme heat, or in bitter cold, or extreme salinity, etc., are known as extremophiles. They have a number of mechanisms that allow them to succeed, including stronger ionic bonds, sensing and reacting to changes in the environment, special proteins for extreme circumstances, inoculation mechanisms to cope with toxins, and special partnerships.

In the chapter, we talked about organizational equivalents to these extremophile mechanisms, including tolerating diversity, monitoring the environment, extreme mentoring, and more. We’re talking about it tonite at a special event, and I reread the article to see what we said then and to reflect on it in light of the subsequent years of experience. I saw several ways in which to augment the thinking we had then.

In thinking about ionic bonds, it’s not only about the diversity (polarity) adding strength, but it strikes me that it’s also about alignment. Diversity is particularly valuable when the different abilities and experiences are pulling in the same direction. It’s important to share and inspire a belief in what the vision is.

On the topic of sensing the environment, I’m reminded of the result from the CLO survey Jay Cross and I did to accompany our Chief Meta-Learning Officer article, where 60% of those who responded thought that their people weren’t talking about the outside trends that shape their business. If people aren’t aware, they can’t adapt! There must be support for individuals to not only self-improve, but to be connected the broader trends in their fields and the organization’s area of endeavor.

Starting from the heat-shock proteins that kick in when things are extreme, I’m mindful of how we need a shift from information presentation or skill-creation to learning facilitation and mentoring. Organizations can’t provide everything employees need anymore, but they can provide support for developing skills for learning, and coping. I’m reminded of how Outward Bound got started, where older mariners were surviving situations that younger, presumably healthier ones weren’t. Which reinforces the call for more ubiquitous mentoring that we argued for back then.

The inoculation approach to toxins sparks two thoughts. One, while we need to tolerate diversity in experience and skills, I suspect we can’t tolerate those who do not buy into the vision and the mission. In my own experience, I’ve seen how the naysayers can undermine organizational effectiveness. Yet incorporating new approaches can be extraordinarily valuable. As I’ve argued before, the approach to take is not to try to appropriate so-called best practices, but instead to understand and contextualize best principles.

And finally, in thinking about symbiosis, one of the revelations has been to see the benefits organizations have found by increasing their dialog not only internally, but externally with partners and customers. The advantages of more transparency and communication, if coupled with a sincere desire to truly listen and respond, are considerable.

It’s always a revelation to re-read something written several years ago and reflect on your thinking then. I’m always amazed (and, mostly, pleased) with what I find. Organizations need to reinforce their culture and learning mechanisms to make themselves more agile and more resilient, and that adaptation is possible on principled grounds.

Presenting in a networked age

30 October 2009 by Clark 2 Comments

The Learning Circuit’s Big Question this month has to do with the increasing prevalence of internet access during presentations. The context is that during presentations it’s certainly possible that your audience is multi-tasking, and the question is; what are the implications? In live presentations, the increasing prevalence of wi-fi or phone data means laptops and/or smartphones can be online, and in virtual ones there’s typically a number of other applications available at the same time.

The audience can be doing things related to the presentation, like live-blogging it, tweeting it, or taking notes (I’ve been known to mindmap a keynote a time or two). They could even be looking up words or phrases mentioned by the speaker, or the speaker’s bio, or related material. Alternatively, they can be doing other things, like checking email, surfing the web, or other, unrelated, activities. Particularly in online presentations, there could actually be live chatting going on in a side-channel.

Are these activities valuable to the listener? Are they valuable to the presenter? Certainly, note taking is (though it doesn’t take connectivity). There’re results on this, particularly if you’re re-representing the material in different ways (mind maps, or paraphrasing). Blogging is, effectively, note-taking so should be valuable too, and tweeting may also be valuable (any studies? Research topic!). Certainly looking up things you don’t know so you process the rest of the material could also be valuable if it doesn’t take too long. And the reprocessing and seeing others’ thoughts from chat could be valuable. Even playing solitaire can be an advantage to listening, if you’re taking up some extra cognitive cycles that might otherwise lead you off into related thoughts but away from the presentation (likely only true if it’s just audio).

On the other hand, it might also add an intrusive overhead. Multi-tasking has been shown to provide a performance decrement. Related activities help, but unrelated activities will hinder the ability to process. It may be that you can get so caught up in the chat, or the search to comprehend a term, that you lose the thread of the discussion. And if it’s complex, the cognitive overhead might prevent you from actually being unable to make the necessary links. Certainly the tasks that aren’t content related are an intrusion.

So what’s to do? There are possible actions on both the part of the presenter/organizer, and on the part of the audience. For the audience, it’s got to be a personal responsibility to know how you learn best, and take appropriate steps. If note-taking helps you focus and elaborate, do so. If tweeting, blogging, or mind-mapping does so, rock on. If you really need to focus: put away the laptop and phone and focus! It’s for your benefit! Really, the same is for students. Now, individuals may not be as self-aware as we may desire, but that’s a separate topic that needs to be taken care of in the appropriate context.

For the presenters or organizers, as the most onerous step they could prevent wi-fi access. However, increasingly others are benefitting from the tweets from conferences and the blogging as well. I think that’s overly draconian, an implicit sign of distrust. If the presentation doesn’t match the audience interests, they should be able to vote with their feet or their minds. As I told a medical school faculty years ago, you can’t force them to attend, taking away the internet might make them resort to doodling or daydreaming but while you can lead a learner to learning you can’t make them think. It’s up to the presenter to present relevant material in an engaging manner.

As a presenter, you can actually use these channels to your advantage. As a webinar presenter, I like having a live chat tool. I monitor it, and use it to ask questions. In the last presentation I gave, it was awkward when a moderator had to read me the questions from the audience, and I couldn’t ask a general question an just survey the stream. I realize it’s difficult to both present and monitor a chat stream, and not all presenters can do it, so having a moderator can be a benefit. But stifling that flow of discussion could be a bane to those who learn better that way.

I haven’t had a tweet stream monitor in a live presentation yet, and it could be harder to pay attention to it, so again a moderator could help. In smaller sessions you can have interaction with the audience, but in larger presentations, it might take someone to follow it and summarize, though having a monitor that the presenter could see easily could also work.

However, it seems to me that you can’t force people to pay attention with or without technology, providing a rich suite of ways for people to process the information is valuable, and it can be a valuable source of feedback during the presentation.

Which leads to the new skills: for audiences, to know how you best process presentations and take responsibility for getting the most out of it; for presenters to improve their presentation skills to ensure value to the audience and support richer forms of interaction with the audiences; for moderators to track and summarize audience feedback in various forms; and for organizers to support these new channels.

There’s no point in trying to stifle technology affordances, the real key is to take advantage of them. If we have to learn, adjust, and accommodate, it’d be awful boring otherwise! :)

Virtual Worlds: Affordances and Learning

25 September 2009 by Clark Leave a Comment

Two days ago I attended the 3D Teaching, Learning, & Collaboration conference, organized by Tony O’Driscoll. I’ve previously posted my thoughts on virtual worlds, but I had a wee bit of a revelation that I want to get clear in my head, and it ties into several things that went on at the conference.

First, let me say that the day of the conference I got to attend was great, with lots of the really involved folks there, and every evidence (including the tweet stream) that the second day was every bit as good. Tony talked about his new book with Karl Kapp, Chuck Hamilton spoke on lessons learned through IBM’s invovlement in Virtual Worlds, Koreen Olbrish chaired a panel with a number of great case studies, to name just a few of the great opportunities.

Chuck listed 10 ‘affordances‘ of virtual worlds, expanding a list Tony had previously started. There was some debate about whether affordance is a good term, since not everyone knows it, but I maintain that for people who need it, it’s the right term and that we can use some term like ‘inherent capability’ for those who don’t. I had some quibbles with Chuck’s list, as it seemed that several confounded some issues, and I hope to talk with him more about it.

Tony also presented, in particular, some principles about designing learning for virtual worlds (see slide 17 here). Interestingly, they aren’t specific to virtual worlds, and mirror the principles for designing engaging learning experiences that come from the alignment of educational practice and engaging experiences I talk about in my book. Glad to see folks honing in on principles for creating meaningful virtual world experiences!

The revelation for me, however, was linking the social informal learning with virtual worlds. Virtual worlds can be used for both formal and informal learning, they’re platforms for social action. I’ve had the formal and informal separated in my mind, but needn’t. I’ve been quite active in social learning to meet informal learning needs with my togetherLearn colleagues, but have always written off virtual worlds as still having too much technical and learning overhead to be worth it unless you have a long-term intention where those overheads get amortized.

What’s clear is that, increasingly, organizations are creating and leveraging those long term relationships. ProtonMedia even announced integration of both Sharepoint and their own social media system with their virtual world platform, so either can be accessed in world or from the desktop. There were a suite of examples across both formal and informal learning where organizations were seeing real, measurable, value.

The underlying opportunities of virtual presence are clear, it’s just not been clear that it’s significantly better than a non-immersive social networking system. Certainly if what your people need to formally learn, or informally network on is inherently 3D, but the contextualization is having some benefits.

Some issues remain. At lunch I was talking to some gents who have a system that streams your face via webcam onto your avatar, so your real expressions are represented. That’s counter to some of the possibilities I see to represent yourself in virtual worlds as you prefer to be seen, not as how nature commands, but there are some trust issues (and parental safety concerns as well).

Still, as technical barriers are surpassed, and audiences become more familiar with and comfortable in virtual worlds, the segue between formal and social networking can be accomplished in world making a virtual business office increasingly viable. It may be time to dust off my avatar and get traveling.

On the road again

21 August 2009 by Clark Leave a Comment

I like going to conferences: exchanging ideas, meeting new people, and just variety. However, I haven’t been on the road since early June for any conferences, after running a workshop at ASTD’s international conference and then presenting at DAU/GMU’s Innovations in eLearning Conference. But it’s that time again.

First, Jay Cross and I will be presenting on the Chief Meta-Learning Officer article we wrote at the Fall CLO Symposium Sept 28-30. We’ll be riffing on the results of the survey we made available as part of the article, looking at what folks are saying about how their organization is learning. There are big opportunities for organizations to improve how the facilitate and leverage their employee ideas, and we’re hoping to help that vision come forth.

At DevLearn (Nov 10-13), Jay and I will be running a 1 day workshop on how to be a Chief Meta-Learning Officer, and I expect we’ll capture some of the process and outcomes that led my attendees at the elearning strategy workshop to say things like “powerful and overwhelming â€“ in a good way!”, “Very current for today‘s priorities”, “extremely useful … I learned so much”, and “Really makes the shift from just
learning and takes it to performance.” While it’ll focus more on the social and informal, that’s where a lot of opportunity is, and it’s really a whole shift about thinking of the learning organization’s role.

I’ll also be presenting the performance ecosystem in an abbreviated form as a concurrent session. I will also partner with Richard Clark to talk about pragmatic mobile development. I’m looking forward to it.

I was also reflecting about what makes a good conference. I don’t know about CLO (my first), but I love the Guild events, and I was trying to figure out why. I think it’s because they do as good a job as anyone at making the event a good experience for all: attendees, exhibitors/sponsors, and speakers. Others come close, but they really strike the best balance.

From an attendee perspective, you want speakers that cover the breadth and depth you want, for different levels of experience, and access to vendors without being hammered with pitches. As a speaker, you want to maximize your exposure if you get to speak, and be treated like a valuable contribution. I can’t speak what it’s like from a vendor perspective, but I reckon it’s fair access to attendees without onerous costs or restrictions. Somehow, the Guild events strike this balance the best, from my perspective as a speaker and attendee.

The ongoing success suggests others feel the same. I was just reviewing the speaker list, and see that in the very first timeslot, you’ve got Allison Rossett going up against Ruth Clark and Ray Jimenez, among others! That’s a pretty heady lineup. The topics are similarly spread to be as interesting as the speakers, with user-generated content, rapid elearning, mobile, games/simulations, and more. And again, that’s only the first timeslot!

I’ll be online presenting in October and again in January, but for someone who’s in elearning, I still value the face to face time when I can get it. Hope to meet you at one of these, please do introduce yourself or say hi!

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