Just getting back from San Jose and a million thanks to Brent and the Guild for an absolutely amazing DevLearn08 (#dl08). The event was held in the beautiful Fairmont hotel near Adobe headquarters and was jammed packed with inspirational keynotes, deep dive concurrent sessions and physical + virtual connections with fellow bloggers, tweeters and learning professionals.

What were your favorite presentations? I was able to catch excellent conversations and sessions on mobile learning (Judy Brown, BJ Schone, Barbara Ludwig, David Metcalf), immersive learning (Mark Oehlert), instructional design using the semantic web (Rueben Tozman), micro-blogging trends (Michelle Lentz), new work literacy (Tony Karrer)…and many, many others. Of course, there was a lot of tweeting going on and informal aha moments. Special shout out to my new T-Mobile teammate Jeff Tillet, who I am excited to dive into new media learning solutions with.

Keynote Highlights

Tim O’Reilly – follow the alpha geeks, early adopters and people who need training the least (high performers). Reach out to them and turn them into mentors, as well as provide convenient resources, reinforcement. Then study successes.

Dan Roam says - break every problem into Who, What, Where, Why and How…all you need is a napkin and sharpie. By the way, I tested the PowerPoint slideshow drawing feature, which is cool and can even convert to a slide object.

John Medina - covered a few of his 12 Brain Rules and how the education system counteracts how the brain has evolved to process and store information.

LinkedIn, da Vinci and Qik dinner

The days and nights were crazy busy, and in a few cab rushed evenings, I was also able to meet up with Jackie Danicki from Qik in beatiful Palo Alto for dinner, see the Leonardo da Vinci exhibit at the Technology Musuem, drive around Google-land and get a tour of LinkedIn headquarters, where we rocked out to Guitar Hero and got free snacks and fruit drinks in the LunchedIn kitchen. Special thanks to my co-presenter George Aston’s cousin Scott (LinkedIn web developer) for the dinner and tour…look forward to further tech discussions.

Thanks to everyone for coming to our 402 session on Using Rapid Video…it was almost a full house, which was cool. After quick hitting brain and film theory fundamentals with video examples, we broke the session into a hands-on video workshop with three groups tasked with props, storyboard and a Flip camera to rapidly create content. George and I were stoked by the amount of participation and levels of creativity. Please find what the groups created below on YouTube, as well as our slide deck in SlideShare. Also, if you are interested in current trends in user generated video, check out my article in Training Solutions Magazine.

402 Workshop Videos

Group 1 | Using paper props

Group 2 | Using real props

Group 3 | Using a flip chart and markers

Note: First few audio seconds for each video have a slight delay…not sure why…maybe a Vista issue with Flip software???

Presentation SlideShare Deck