eLearning Guild DevLearn 2009 Trip Report

I received a very nice direct message from Shanta Rohse (@shantarohse) yesterday, alerting me that she'd used one of my DevLearn 2009 presentation slides in her recently featured blogpost in eLearning Magazine. I am super flattered that my "Hype Cycle Meets the Innovation Adoption Curve" (Think Gartner Hype Cycle meets Everett Rogers) graphic captured Shanta's attention, excited that this simple illustratation captured some of the same unease about where the elearning profession seems to get stuck for her that it does for me. Of course it's fine with me if she wants to share, are you kidding?? Shanta, thank you for the attribution.

I was also very pleased to see that the eLearning Guild Research Report on User Generated Content by two of my Sage Road associates, (Managing Director) Beth Davis and (Research Associate) Dr. Colleen Carmean, was also highlighted in Shanta's blog post. The research report is almost done. Really. I confess that I am holding up the final manuscript as I make some final edits. I want it to be ready for prime time. Look for us around the first of the year,

Anyway, I was so pleased about Shanta's very nice comments that I decided to add a "PS" to my DevLearn Trip Report posting. Imagine my surprise to discover that the post had never made it to the published blog. It was still hanging there, in "DRAFT" form, waiting for me to wrap things up. Apparently with all the excitement of the past few weeks, I had forgotten to toggle, tag and publish. Not as embarrassing as forgetting to include the "D" when sending a direct message to someone on Twitter. (In case you don't tweet...if you don't include the letter "D" and your friend's Twitter name, then you end up sharing your special private message with all followers and Facebook friends.) So many social media faux pas, so little time.

Enough. Sorry about the delay in getting this posted. DevLearn 2009, was a great event. Without further ado, here is my DevLearn 2009 Trip Report.

The Sage Road Solutions crew spent November 10- 13th in San Jose, CA with more than 1300 DevLearn 2009 attendees (#dl09 for those who care about things like hashtags.) We were busy - Beth Davis and Colleen Carmean presented the results of the LMS Deep Analysis report we recently completed for the eLearning Guild this past October, 2009. Colleen and Beth presented the results of our about to be published analysis report entitled The User Generated Content Revolution. I presented the results of Beth Davis's and my industry overview report entitled Navigating the Learning Technologies Metaverse. Look for this published analysis sometime around the beginning of 2010. Colleen and I were both a part of the Research Panel session along with Analysts Janet Clarey from Brandon Hall Research, David Mallon from Bersin Associates and and Kevin Martin from Aberdeen Research.

Kudos to the eLearning Guild DevLearn team. Brent Schlenker, Mary Alexander, Juli Balding, and the entire eLearning Guild crew gave us a well organized, well run conference. From program to logistics, things really worked.

Yay for eLearning. As someone who has been around the space for a while, there is a prickly, uneasy excitement in the air that we haven't felt in our industry for the last 10 year. Yes we all know that the recession continues and the things will never be the same, and we have to get leaner and meaner and smarter and better. Yes, we know that this means getting serious about improving our own professional skills so that we can better anticipate where our customers stakeholders want us to take them. Still, as I look at the movement on the merger and acquisition front, and watch what's happening in proprietary education, publishing and personal communications technologies, 2010 looks like is going to be a big and better year for some of us, and NOBODY wants to be left behind.

Adobe Learning Summit. Not exactly part of DevLearn, but still an important part of the DevLearn experience in San Jose. This had been one of my signature events when I worked you know where. Would have been super easy to kill it when I left. But thanks to the loud enthusiastic voices of the elearning community Adobe didn't do that. Instead, Shantanu Narayan, the CEO of Adobe Systems, Inc. was the featured keynote speaker at this year's ALS. Very, very nice.

Mark Oehlert and Social Media Camp. It was hard not to stop by on the way to and from other sessions, by virtue of its crossroads location AND because there were always so many people clustered around.

Breakfast Bytes. I like the round-table, informal discussion format better than the mini-presentation format we used this year. Aside from this very minor nit I continue to appreciate the opportunity for time that encourages discussion. Even at 7 am.

Time with Cammy Bean. Call me old-fashioned. it was great to have some F2F time. I really appreciate the design sensibility that Cammy brings to her work. We are collaborating on research that we'll be presenting at the Learning Solutions conference in March. Stay tuned for more on that.

Almost as good as being there. Thanks to our community's increasing facility with social media tools and techniques, one can participate in F2F events from just about anywhere. This year's DevLearn was a perfect example of that. No doubt, we are not a sharing-impaired people. Here are links to several of great summaries of featured DevLearn events and activities from Clark Quinn, Steve Howard, Avron Barr, Aaron Silvers, and Koreen Olbrish.

The Twitter Backchannel. Search on #dl09 using your browser - and yes, that is a smaller case d as in dev, smaller case l as in learn - and you will see what I mean.Tracy Hamilton ( @hamtra) has compiled a Tweetbook for your convenience.

#Lrnchat at DemoFest. I think it is totally funny that Brent Schlenker made accommodations for all the Lrnchatters to get their weekly fix in the midst of DevLearn's big techno-reception.

The keynotes were great, the sessions engaging, the camaraderie excellent. One of the high points of the autumn 2009 season. Certainly looking forward to Learning Solutions in March, 2010.