Wednesday, June 1, 2011

ASTD ICE 2011 Recap

What a conference!. Huge, I mean really huge in terms of attendees and vendors. This is my second conference within a months time after being to the LS 2011, and this is the mother of all elearning conferences. The orange county convention was one of the biggest convention centres I've ever been to. Well organized and more iPad giveaways that you can think of. Freebie seekers had a field day.

I had a great time at ASTD International Conference & Expo 2011 in Orlando and once again great chance to meet up with friends. Networking among attendees reached new heights. Meetups, tweetups you name it!.

Social learning, mobile learning and game based learning are the hottest trends in this expo.

More sessions than you can attend. So many interesting ones happening parallely and it was difficult to choose which one to go to.

Falling in love all over again with instructional design and educational pshycology by Allison Rossett was spot on - How to get into minds and hearts of the learner with various techniques. Social Media at Work by Mary Ellen on what we can learn from trail blazing organisations, Social Networking by Dennis Mankin was the other interesting ones I attended.

So many interesting vendors strutting their stuff. See interesting ones below:

Social learning is the new cool. Interactyx Social learning platform is really cool way one in the new breed of social learning solutions. I am not sure the uptake in organisations still, but watch that space, it may explode in future.

Authoring - Allen interactions Zebra had a bigger presence than LS 2011 with Zebra Apps. Looked good, but again when people are moving to HTML5 not sure I want to learn a new Flash based authoring system. Articulate Storyline looked promising and its support for iOS is exciting.

Saw many of the same vendors for authoring tools and there were some improvements across the board but there was one that I am pulling for and that is Zenler. They are set to go into the final beta phase of the Pro version of their Zenler Studio. They showed me game based learning, as well as video, audio and flash tools that are all in one program and it seemed easy to use from the demo I saw. I will be putting them on my watch list.

Game Bases learning is coming back big time. Lots of game based custom developers, virtual worlds. See above for Zenler review as it supports tool based development of game based courses development now.

Mobile learning - Lots of vendors started supporting mobile and that includes NetDimensions, and Kineo's mobile service. Again mobile is as hot as it can get.

I have blown my budget attending two conferences within a month. I need a break now!