DevLearn ‘09 Recap – What an Awesome Conference!
I’ve just come home from DevLearn 09. DevLearn is the eLearning Guild’s annual developer conference held in San Jose. This is the second time I have gone there, with this year being the first time I have spoken at the event. It was fantastic fun, holding lots of revelations and surprises. Now, tired but happy, begins the real work. The work of consolidating the notes, following up on the contacts made (some virtual contacts finally made real… I always love when that happens) and trying to make some steps to implement the great ideas I picked up there and talked over with new and old colleagues.
The event’s venue is at the Fairmont Hotel and it really is a great place for an gathering the size of Devlearn. Plenty of space, lots of bandwidth coming into the building and a wealth of options in the area for meeting, eating and having some drinks with friends. (Not to mention the great Karaoke, right Aaron?) There are so many positive things to say about the conference, from the expo hall to the lunch conversations and various networking opportunities, it’s clear that the Guild knows how to organize and facilitate a professional and pleasurable conference.
The keynotes from Andrew McAfee (insightful and reassuring), Eric Zimmerman (fun, if a little bit spastic) and Leo Laporte (so good!) were awesome, with me spending a good amount of time geeking out with Mr. Laporte and chatting with him and a small group outside the main ballroom on a variety of topics ranging from Rupert Murdoch’s cluelessness to Android vs. iPhone development hurdles and also what’s next for TWiT and his plans for a great new digital delivery system coming soon for his content. 
I even got a picture with him… check it out. What a great guy and so super nice!
Some other really good things about this year’s event: A lot more real content on mobile delivery. This is notable not for the fact that there were sessions on mobile, but rather that they really were focused on the realities of today… That you can actually start to deliver for mobile due to the ever increasing ubiquity of capable devices. Exciting stuff!
Another welcome change this year, a LOT less commercial-like sessions on tools. This was a major problem last year in my opinion and it’s reassuring after talking o a number of Guild people that they are taking big steps to prevent this from occurring now. Nice work guys. Last year I would say fully 20-25% of all sessions I hit had a very infomercial feel to them and this year I can only recall a couple sessions that I hit that felt like that at all.
The DevLearn 09 Zombie Apocalypse Alternative Reality Game (ARG) set up for the conference was also super cool. I found a lot of great content and was able to connect with other attendees in a new way and overall it was a big success for the organizers and developers. The folks at Tandem and Hybrid Learning did some stellar work getting this up and running and I look forward to hearing more from them on how to roll these sorts of ARGs out to other organizations and events. I could see The Iona Group implementing a solution like this for one of our clients if the opportunity arose. That would be some serious fun!
A number of sessions I saw really had me enthralled and ready to use the knowledge gained. Bryan Chapman’s talk on Repurposing Content for various delivery formats was so poignant and packed with facts. I need to review those notes and share the deck with my coworkers and some clients immediately. Seeing the esteemed Dr. Allen and his lead Flex architect, Patrick Krekelberg, from Allen Interactions, demo their new Adobe AIR app, Zebra was jaw dropping. I wish I had that software right now. I could be busting out some rich interactions and blowing clients minds. 
When finished, you can bet it’s going to shake up the industry. Dr. Allen, certainly had something with Authorware (begrudged as it may be, it was great eLearning development software for it’s day), and this appears to be just as much of a game changer, IMHO. The folks from JTInc. had some good info I will find useful in my localization efforts going forward. Lots of ideas popping! So many many others to mention… Too many to cover here, I think.
That said, the conference wasn’t all rainbows and unicorns for me. There are some real underlying problems I have with the conference’s overwhelming love affair with Social Media or Web 2.0 or whatever you may want to call it. Let me clarify that, please. It’s not that I don’t find Social Media useful for learning, for collaborating, for connecting. On the contrary, my Twitter feed teaches me so much every day. Our company’s Wiki is indispensible. The answers section on LinkedIn is a wealth of treasures I use all the time. This is the real problem… Isn’t it so pervasive at this point that it seems like stating the obvious over and over again is a bit of a waste of time in a conference like this? Do we really need 5-6 sessions about “Leveraging Twitter in your Learning Organization”? Now, I just made that session title up, but it may have been used for real… certainly a version of it was. The topic was beaten to death by the tons of people pounding it in. Given that Mark Oehlert so masterfully managed the Social Learning Jam as a dedicated area for discussion about using Social Media for learning in the eneterprise, it seems a tad silly to have so many concurrent session on the topic.
I may be cast out by talking so candidly about this, but here’s the crux of it for me: If the conference really is called “DevLearn” shouldn’t their be more “Dev” in the schedule? I mean, how hard is it to set up a Twitter account or get your IT to install a wiki these days? Not very. Couldn’t there be a slant to these Social Media topics to bring forth some real “Dev” issues? Here are some examples: “Integrating your Employee’s Twitter feeds into a HR friendly Dashboard using Adobe AIR”, “Connecting MediaWiki to your HR-IS Authentication Systems”, “Securing your Opensource eLearning Systems”, “Rejuvenating Legacy Learning Systems Via WebServices”, “Engaging your IT Department to Create Some Kick Ass Learning”. I would be very interested in hearing what other DevLearn attendees and Guild members think about this line of thought. From my point of view, there was very little content at the conference on actually “developing”, or at least what I would consider “developing”. I think I went to two or three sessions that dealt with real development topics, but that was about it.
Now, on to scheduling and time blocking. An issue I noticed is that with a venue and gathering of this size, you are sure to miss out on some great sessions due to concurrency and overlap of schedules. There were several times this happened this year. This was clearly evidenced to me last evening, when in the hotel lobby lounge I met Steven Wenrich, a highly talented Flash platform developer. He mentioned he had given a session that day on using Papervision in eLearning. Say wha? And I missed it? NOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!! When I told him that Mark Tovey and I had delivered a session on building your own custom ActonScript API for eLearning development, he felt the same way. Then, another person at the table let us know there was yet another session given at the exact same time on Augmented Reality in Flash for eLearning. This says to me that it may be time to split DevLearn into tracks. One track for software/coding/development. One track for content developers. One track for business/management. Maybe one track for Instructional Designers. Just a thought, but with 6 or more concurrent sessions going on at the same time, it would probably let some people see more content that really spoke to them, preventing walkouts and making sure you maximize your DevLearn experience. By splitting up tracks, it would a lot easier to avoid the scenario I mentioned, and, depending on how many tracks you wanted to create, it could virtually eliminate it.
Let me recap by stating though my criticisms may be sharp, they are meant to be constructive. And I also want to reiterate that the praise given is well deserved, the Guild truly has put together an unbeatable event again and I absolutely feel that it was time well spent and completely worth every penny spent to attend it. I will absolutely be attending again.
