Here at ASTD...first session reviews...Ruth Clark and Tony Karrer...

First, for full disclosure...I served this year as one of the co-chairs for the e-learning track at ASTD. I will say that I think that Linda David and Pat Byers did amazing work on the program and they (along with my fellow committee members) deserve great credit. I hope that if they read anything that they perceive as negative here, it is taken in the spirit of going from good to great. (I don't want to scare anybody, I just want that disclaimer up front because I really do respect all the hard work and effort that goes into pulling something like this off and the deserve kudos for both organization and content).

Initial Impressions: Geez there are a lot of people here! 8K is the official number but wow there are crowds everywhere. The program is also packed and the printed version could be used as a heck of a doorstop - this is something that also concerns me - I wonder what conferences can do to start looking at ways to do some serious carbon offsetting, something to chew through fewer trees and so forth..it seems like the learning and training industry would be a good one to do something radical like outlaw the printing of huge guides...I know this is also a question of revenue so let's apply some creative thought to this and do a little planet saving along the way.

There is also a huge international presence and I want to send a big American shout out to my new buddy, Michal Zaborek from House of Skills in Poland – I hope you take that love of baseball all the way back to Poland!

So now onto my first two sessions....

First, how the hell am I to say anything contrary to Ruth Clark? Some upstart punk who doesn't even have an education degree...just a poor historian and anthropologist who has some observations that are probably way off base anyway....well, that's never stopped me before.

So the first session was Ruth Clark on "Beyond Fads, Fables and Folklore." I really want to see this session. The topic really touches a nerve with me and I am looking forward to hearing what she has to say. I can’t escape though, some kind of ill feeling though, when I am walking into the session and along with the session handouts, I am given a note indicating that Ruth will be doing a book signing immediately following her presentation and a full color catalog concerning the offerings from Clark Training and Consulting. Somehow my feelings are now that whatever she presents will be less than objective in the sense that since she has clearly already productized the results of this research, she is probably (its really only human nature) less than likely to include material of a dissenting nature. Given the title of this session, there is a certain irony flavoring this – maybe commercials should also be listed as one of the things to be beyond.

There is also this small issue of the fact that on the cover of her handouts, there is a picture of the guys from the TV show Mythbusters, also on this front cover is a copyright mark for “2007 Ruth Clark”…as someone interested in issues of copyright I both have to wonder why someone in this field wouldn’t use a Creative Commons license for this material (that question is really rhetorical) and about the legality of laying your copyright on top of almost certainly, other copyrighted images. She is the first in a series of speakers, the label for which is “Legends” – who else gives its folks that kind of appellation? The reason I say that is not to denigrate the amazing body of work she has amassed but rather to say that when you designate certain people as "legends" or demi-gods or whatever, you really kind of stifle the ability for people to disagree with them.

I am also realizing that I have terrible problems with authority and I need to work on that.

Warning: stream of consciousness notes ahead...

So we are hearing about "

Evidence-based practice"…25 years old…from medicine, quotes a section of “No Child Left Behind”…are we pretending that calling something “scientific” removes any question of bias? Why are we still asking the question – which is better f2f or e-learning? Are we seriously still ignoring the artifice of that inquiry? Which is better when? For whom?

Talks about a meta-analysis (Bernard et al 2004) on distance v classroom….most effect sizes is grouped around zero meaning no sig difference, haven’t we ridden that horse to death already? Chess Research: Great. This research proves that context is more important to experts than novices. Shocking. Prior knowledge = context

Do visuals improve learning? Why not ask, when are visuals appropriate? Multimedia principle (Mayer) says that word+pictures is almost always better than words alone.

So Mayer’s “Coherence Priniciple” says that better learning will result when there aren’t a whole bunch of irrelevant materials added in. Again, I’m shocked.

 “Games have been proven in some cases to degrade learning and it depends on the design”….are you serious? Design matters? Relevance matters?  Well no kidding. This just struck me as a little slight on games just tossed in there.

Modality Principle: graphic should only be explained with narration than with text or with text and narration.  …cognitive load principle..gives some conditions for best places in which to employ modality…

Encoding Specificity: Transfer is maximized when the conditions at retrieval match those present during encoding…..”THINK CONTEXT”…wow, really? Doesn’t that seem to argue for the inclusion of virtual worlds, etc so that we can REALLY create a high fidelity context for practice?

Gosh, call the papers, spreading practice out results in better transfer than crammed in practice. So after reading these comments, I guess in large measure I'm not disagreeing with her but rather asking if these are the interesting questions we should be looking at right now.

 

Second session: Tony Karrer on Web 2.0/eLearning 2.0

Don’t tell me there isn’t a hunger for understanding how this stuff works and relates to training and learning. Not only is the joint packed, but the buzz in the room is palpable – now Tony is good looking and a great speaker but I have to give some of the credit to the topic matter.

 

<off topic insert – hotels and convention centers STOP RIPPING US OFF!!!! Don’t charge me $4 for a Coke and then ask me to pay $15 for 24 hours of access to a crippled 56K wireless connection you blood-sucking vampires!! Tell you what, how about 1 hotel chain or 1 freaking convention center show some respect to their customers and see how much business you get!!>

 …Tony was CTO for eHarmony for 4 years…I never knew...½ audience is new to e-learning, most everyone knows what a wiki is and many have edited a page, many less on social bookmarking, 1/3 are bloggers, look up Amara’s Law (We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run). Tony starts with looking back to learning design in 1987 (printed), 1997 (CDs), 2007 multi-modal, complicated blends, …brings up competition point, that our training is not competition-free, that we are competing against Google in many cases, follow up is key to ultimately getting performance – technology allows us greater opps to hit people and drive toward performance,  courses and courseware as modes of delivery are becoming smaller portions…what impact does this have on Clark’s stuff?,

 Moves into Wiki: (what about the browser as a Web 2.0 tool?) compares ease of wiki editing to updating your corp intranet…everyone laughs…grab delicious feed for tk2007…(TekKnowledge 2007) (how is he doing the magnifying trick?) …see post on his blog

Blogs: not much new...audience is pretty familiar

RSS: not just blogs but what else can generate RSS feeds,

Someone asks question about how you validate the information…same way you do now…you develop your bias based on your interactions with communities…and then you base your validation on your experience with that community, this means that the ability to think critically and conduct independent, impartial evaluations of data become more important than ever….Blue Moon story…Chinese symbol story…

Moves into doing a scenario…maybe put example right up front and then use the rest of the time to explain how all of this fits together……end with a To Do list for people to take back home…two focal points, one how could these things help my company…two – how could these things help me. Urges people to start blogging for at least a month - you bet! Overall, great presentation and I learned some nifty points that I will promptly be stealing for my bits.