When Shanta Rohse tweeted about her experiences at DevLearn 2009, I asked her to write a guest blog post with more details, which she kindly did:
Each morning at DevLearn09, Brent Schlenker primed his audience with a deceptively simple question: What one thing did you learn?. It is the perfect filter for the deluge of learning opportunities that is DevLearn. Imagine some 1200 passionate learning professionals, fueled by provocative speakers, good food, free wireless, and abundant social opportunities. What couldn’t I learn? I have a plethora of notes, tweets and ideas on wireless everywhere, augmented reality, co-designed learning experiences, immersive learning simulations, corporate microblogging, cloud computing….
And now it is three weeks later. I am back in the office, that place where enthusiasm, experimentation and the enterprise must somehow meaningfully mesh. Ellen Wagner captures this discord with precision in my favourite slide of the conference (how’s that for microcontent). In her survey of emerging technologies she juxtaposes Gartner’s Hype Cycle with Roger’s Diffusion of Innovations, and then maps where our stakeholders need our support versus where many of us would like to spend our time. Notably, there is no overlap.

So, rethinking Brent’s question three weeks on, I wonder if I have learned any means of bringing bridging this gap in my practice. I have learned three things, I think, one for each time he asked the question:
1) Narrate your work.
Why? The reason goes well beyond supporting better collaboration says Andrew McAfee. Broadcasting your expertise and publishing your questions makes it easier to find people who can support your business goals. Blogs and microblogs knit together colleagues separated by discipline and geography in unique and productive ways. But how can we narrate our work when social media platforms are not part of the IT infrastructure? In their session on user-generated content, Colleen Carmean and Beth Davis ask, “What are elearning professionals doing to lower the threshold for publishing?” It is easier to advocate publishing when stakeholders and elearning professionals are interested in the same tools. Colleen Carmean points out that learners and staff use Web 2.0 tools at home, experience the benefits, and bring their expectations to the workplace. In the last six months, I’ve used a wiki, tracked progress in collaborative project management software, and, surprisingly, collaborated in Facebook. Admittedly, these activities have been peripheral activities, and none of them are core projects. But they were non-existent only a year ago. My experience is that the potential of emerging technologies compells nearly everyone eventually.
2) Trust that your friends will show you what you need.
I knew there were zombies among us at DevLearn, but I haven’t paid attention to serious games and simulations since 2005, when I demonstrably closed my Second Life account. I am interested, but I have never found stakeholders equally receptive. My crammed agenda made it easy to say no to Alicia Sanchez’s Serious Games Zone. But a flash on her screen during a hallway demo of the Krongregate game site captured my peripheral attention and yanked me out of my planned trajectory. A few minutes couldn’t hurt, so I returned later to find out how games could be used to improve foreign language skills (a personal interest), and again on the session on adventure games. The next day, when Eric Zimmerman pointed out that “games are the media of systems,” I found myself nodding in agreement. When Rajat Paharia described how media companies leverage our desire for virtual rewards into customer engagement, my mind had already started whirring with new learning applications. That afternoon I had a chance encounter with an instructional designer and World of Warcraft aficionado, who offered me a tour of Azeroth. Back in my hotel room I received my umpteenth Facebook invitation to some phenomenon called FarmVille. I decided to accept. Conferences like DevLearn are flush with serendipitous paths. But only when Leo Laporte advised that we trust our friends did I realize that this was in fact what I had been doing. This is the info-overloaded learning professional’s equivalent of falling backwards into a crowd and knowing they will catch you.
3) Things do not take as long as you imagine.
A corollary of what did you learn might be what did you unlearn. For several years, I have been unlearning my assumptions about how long activities take. Rapid elearning challenged my assumptions about training development. The TED Talks made me see that complex presentations could be delivered in under twenty minutes. Last year, I learned that with microblogging tools like twitter let us learn in 140 character doses. At DevLearn I discovered that research time can also be shrunk. In his session on real time research, Mark Friedman reported on collaborative twitter research that was conceived, executed, analyzed and reported in just two days (during a conference no less). Yes, real time research is a somewhat improvisational investigation, perhaps not suited to make groundbreaking scholarly advancements, but it does suggest a way to explore ways that different areas in an organization might collaborate before committing huge dollars. And there are few models for successful collaboration among disparate colleagues. This is surely something stakeholders would be interested in.
What I like about these three things is that they are inspired by emerging technologies, but not dependent on IT infrastructure. They are of interest to passionate learning professionals and passionate stakeholders alike, and they drive all of us forward, or at the very least do not impede progress along the innovation curve, at whatever pace that happens to be.
Shanta Rohse is a learning advisor and enthusiast for Canadian Blood Services. She narrates her work at portable learner and on twitter/shantarohse.