Many e-Learning professionals think of The eLearning Guild’s conferences as the intellectual equivalent of a meal with friends, a feast of ideas. If you’re one of them, the DevLearn Conference & Expo might be your idea of that meal with a luscious dessert. With whipped cream and a cherry on top.
With a record 1,600+ e-Learning professionals attending, DevLearn 2010 continued the tradition of being on the “cutting edge” of e-Learning. This conference has become international in scope, demonstrating the growing importance worldwide of advanced technologies in e-Learning. This year, 9% of those attending came from outside the United States – representing 29 different countries.
DevLearn, each year’s fall Guild event, is not the same kind of program as the Learning Solutions conference in the spring. DevLearn has a focus on what is new and what is in the future, how practitioners are using the newest tools and technologies to deliver learning, and it aims toward the more experienced e-Learning professional. There are no "newbie" sessions (i.e. what is an LMS, what is social media?). The program developers assume an audience that has been creating or managing e-Learning for a while, one in which those in attendance want to talk to other seasoned professionals and managers.
This year, November 3 through 5 in San Francisco, the theme of the conference was “The New Face of Learning” – which, as it happens, is you. DevLearn featured four thought-provoking keynotes (John Seely Brown, Byron Reeves, Thornton May, and Marcia Conner) on topics that revolved around this theme. There were optional Certificate sessions beginning on Monday, November 1. The Conference days themselves were packed from 7 am (Breakfast Bytes, informal discussions led by experts and practitioners), through the day (dozens of concurrent sessions, plus near-continuous presentations on media for learning, mobile learning, serious games, social learning, and authoring tools). The day went on into the evening, too (receptions, dinner groups, and special presentations, including the Brandon Hall Research Excellence in Learning Awards). The “dessert” for many was the DemoFest in the early evening of Thursday, November 5 (see my summary of DevLearn here, with photos and a video).
Rather than simply recapping everything that went on (an impossible task), you’ll find links to what others said (and are still saying) about DevLearn 2010 in the rest of this article. And here are some more photos for you as well.
The roving camera at DevLearn
Wrap-up from bloggers
If you use a search engine to find comments about DevLearn 2010, you will come up with a lot of results. Here are some of the key summaries by bloggers.
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Laura Dickson (Laura Dickson’s Posterous): http://lauradickson.posterous.com/devlearn-2010-the-aftermath
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Jane Hart (Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies): http://janeknight.typepad.com/pick/2010/11/devlearn-2010-but-no-time-for-blogging.html
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Aaron Silvers (ADL): http://www.aaronsilvers.com/2010/11/the-devlearn-2010-write-up-dl10/
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Philip Hutchison (pipwerks): http://pipwerks.com/2010/11/08/devlearn-2010-recap/
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Kevin Thorn (LearnNuggets): http://www.learnnuggets.com/2010/11/my-first-devlearn-2010-review-a-different-perspective/
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Jay Cross (Internet Time Alliance):
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Inge De Waard (Ignatia Webs):
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http://ignatiawebs.blogspot.com/2010/11/yes-dl10-devlearn-2010-has-started-and.html
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http://ignatiawebs.blogspot.com/2010/11/dl10-benefits-of-using-voting-boxes-for.html
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http://ignatiawebs.blogspot.com/2010/11/dl10-keynote-wednesday-3-november-2010.html
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http://ignatiawebs.blogspot.com/2010/11/dl10-all-of-our-voices-on-thornton-mays.html
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Nemo Chu (Bloomfire blog): http://bloomfire.com/blog/2010/11/09/2-emerging-learning-trends-distilled-from-devlearn-2010/
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Koreen Olbrish (Tandem Learning): http://learningintandem.blogspot.com/2010/11/devlearn-2010-reflections.html
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Jenny Tsai-Smith: http://www.mindmeister.com/68149221/devlearn-2010-idea-catcher
Twitter hashtag archives
There were over 7,600 tweets by 890 Twitterers during the course of the conference. Fortunately, several services captured and archived these.
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Twitter stats from DL10: http://summarizr.labs.eduserv.org.uk/?hashtag=dl10
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Twazzup (Real time tweets): http://www.twazzup.com/?q=%23dl10&l=all
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TwapperKeeper (Most recent, may not be complete record): http://twapperkeeper.com/hashtag/dl10
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What the Hashtag! (Everything November 1-7): http://wthashtag.com/transcript.php?page_id=19902&start_date=2010-11-01&end_date=2010-11-07&export_type=HTML
Conclusion
We hope to see many of you in Orlando March 23-25, 2011 for the Learning Solutions Conference & Expo (practical, proven approaches to e-Learning design and delivery, what is being used now, plus some theory and basics), in San Jose June 21-23, 2011 for mLearnCon (mobile learning), and in Las Vegas November 2-4, 2011 for the next DevLearn.
