Learning Technologies

is over for another year.  I think I skipped a year so this is my first since 08.  And I really enjoyed it for a number of reasons:

Great and enthusiastic people willing to talk and share

Some very good sessions, some unexpected

Catching up with friends and colleagues

General professional way it was organised:  felt firmly under control

But what did I learn?

• Firstly that the learning and development community is vibrant and will to accept change.
• Secondly that the recession has generated a lot of innovation
• Thirdly Social networking is really taking hold
• Fourthly that virtual worlds still need a lot of work to justify the effort and that effort might not best be put into Second Life
• Words like rapid, in time and small scale are really indicative of a whole range of initiatives
• Money is still a big issue but much social learning has been sold on the back of economy drives but that does not invalidate the result on the contrary...
• "Civil society cannot be reduced to a digital free for all" Puttnam
• We need some stats related to the UK market not just the US.
• Deep specialists are required all over organisations and their expertised networked and made accesible
• LMS = eLearning platform  2001 - 2003; Enterprise learning platform 2004 - 2007; Learning Portal 2008 -2010 (Josh Bersin)
• Learning culture has a direct impact on organisational performance (Josh B)
• At IBM you can look up the person you want to emulate and see what they are reading! (Josh B again)
• "You hired them, why don't you trust them' Mark Oehlert

It was also the conference where Twitter came of age.  There were some wonderful snippets flowiing past. I hope we can capture them for posterity.