eLearning Roadtrip

Vorwärts zu Online Educa Berlin

The Roadtrip gets to take a break from the non-stop travel of the past month to catch up on things at both work and home. My next big adventure comes with this year's Thanksgiving  celebration.  I am thrilled to be hosting Thanksgiving dinner for several of my wildly adventuresome friends, including Wayne Hodgins and John Alonso. @WWWayne has recent returned from 11 months at sea (including a direct encounter with the tsunami in Samoa a few months ago), during which time he has sailed from Bodega Bay CA to Whangarei, New Zealand.  John Alonso and crew are about to take off on an amazing race  through Baja California. I am looking forward to hearing all about their adventures, safely settled here in Sonoma at fireside.

Following the long holiday weekend, I'll be taking the Roadtrip to Online Educa Berlin. I attended my first OEB 10 years ago, and have had the good fortune to attend many of the years since that time. It is, without a doubt, my favorite international conference. I'm very pleased that I'll be participating in this year's program  - as chair of the Friday morning plenary session entitled "Hindsight, Insight, Foresight, Oversight: A Call for Learning Futures" and, along with Clive Shepherd, Donald Clark and Jane Hart,  as  one of the participants in this year's OEB Battle of the Bloggers. Here is a link to a column that appeared in the current issue of Checkpoint eLearning where I had a chance to reflect on the upcoming "battle".Given the new partnership that Sage Road has forged with the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education, I will be attending this year's OEB in two capacities - first as a Partner and Principal Analyst for Sage Road Solutions, where I will be keeping an eye out for news and trends to share with eLearning practitioners in the US. Secondly I will be observing the conference as the newly appointed Executive Director of WCET, so I will be keenly interested in learning more about consortial activities affecting higher education enterprises around the world. (This last bit of news is going to be the featured story in my next blogpost, so stay tuned!)

Dinner with @marciamarcia

Last Thursday evening, as scores of learning professionals clustered around their keyboards to participate in #Lrnchat, I was sitting down to dinner with the creative spark behind the popular social media event.  Marcia Conner, known in the Twitter-sphere as @marciamarcia, had been in San Francisco for a couple of days, engaging with various social media gurus at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. I returned to SFO from Denver's EDUCAUSE conference a few hours before Marcia was to fly back to Virginia, so I was thrilled to be able to spend a couple of hours of quality face-to-face time with her. 

Marcia and I have been friends since back in the dot.com days when the possibilities for learning and technologies were starting to set the world on fire. I still have the copy of Dr. Seuss's If I Ran the Zoo that Marcia sent me as I was struggling to figure out enterprise decision-making. We have learned together, from each other, informally and formally, F2F and distributed, for more than a decade. 

It's been a great deal of fun for me watching Marcia's impact and influence on the learning and social media world grow and spread over the years. So in addition to catching up on the news of our mutual friends I had a chance to hear about her new work - including the social media book that she is doing with Tony Bingham - and perhaps best of all we had a chance to talk about some of the common misperceptions that social media can be constrained, now that the so-called cat is out of the bag.

We reflected on recent statistics reporting that more than 54% of today's enterprises limit employee access to social media while on the job. Marcia told me that one thing that EVERY enterprise executive needs to understand is that there is no way to block social media in the workplace. Unless, of course people are forbidden to use their personal mobile devices, their personal instant messenger account accounts, and the like. As if.

This was particularly amusing to me, having lived through the period of elearning history where Flash was a "bad" plug-in. Back in the day, one of the companies I worked for even forbade us from using Flash, even though our elearning customers asked for it.  Eventually Flash prevailed and the company I worked for vanished along with others that didn't give their customers what they wanted. (And yes, I thought it particular delicious that I ended up working at the "Flash company". But I digress...)

Marcia told me that social media in general and Twitter in particular are some of the best things to happen to learning in a long time. Watching how she gets groups of people to engage, interact and inspire each other using fewer than 140 characters, regardless of location, time of day and connecting device, I have to agree.

If you have never had a chance to see what happens when learning professions get their hands on Twitter technologies you owe it to yourself to check out a session of #Lrnchat. Thursday nights. 5:30 - 7:00 PST. If' you've never done this before....Go online, download a copy of Tweetgrid. Put in the search term #Lrnchat. Kick back and watch the tweets roll. When u get brave enough, jump on in and post a thought or two. (and remember to read the "drinking game" rules - it will explain why there are occasional moments of hilarity when certain phrases make their way across the screen......)