The Learning Solutions Conference and Expo continued into a second exciting, learning-filled day. Here are some highlights and photos from yesterday and today.
Thursday keynote: Nancy Duarte on transforming learners and audience
Nancy Duarte presents the Thursday keynote: Virtual Stories.
Nancy Duarte, author of Slide:ology and resonate: Presenting Visual Stories that Transform Audiences, kept attendees spellbound during her keynote. She used stories from her personal experience and analysis of excellent presenters, including Steve Jobs and Dr. Martin Luther King, to demonstrate the principles that enable instructional designers to connect with learners. Some of her stories of personal presentation disasters were funny, and some struck a chord with anyone who has ever had a presentation that succeeded beyond their wildest dreams (as well as those that were total failures).
While the basics (know your audience, know your outcomes) were familiar ideas, Duarte also introduced the techniques of good screenwriting and the systems for developing good story structure, from Aristotle and Joseph Campbell to Freytag. She then presented her own approach, a presentation “shape” that will capture learners and bring them along to the bliss of their new learning, new abilities, and new world. Duarte showed how to use media and engagement to get physical reactions and move learners in support of the learning objectives. It is especially important to include “STAR moments” (STAR = Something They Will Always Remember). As she said, make sure the last thing your learners hear is how glorious their new world will be once they adopt it.
Stories are not easy. But they are essential to learning.
Popular sessions
It’s interesting to see which sessions are drawing the largest crowds at this conference. This gives you an idea about where the attendees are and also about the topics that are likely to be generating the most interest this year.
Some of the heavily attended sessions the first two days were those concerned with:
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Using the Mac (OS X) ecosystem to cut e-Learning development time and improve delivery
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Rapid e-Learning development with SME collaboration
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Emerging instructional design and outcome measurement strategies
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Making attractive e-Learning in order to obtain engagement
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Linking mLearning to business strategy
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HTML 5
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Free tools
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Visual design
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Lessons learned in design and implementation
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Use of social media and social learning
Postcards from the Conference
