About a month ago 2000+ elearning fans and practitioners from 80+ countries -all nice people- gathered at the annual Online Educa Berlin conference again. I was there. I'm nice too (stop laughing, am so). Below is not an overview of the sessions I attended, because other people have done a much greater job at that than I ever would have. So I'll limit myself to some impressions.
As last year, there was a nice separate/included Business Educa track, especially for the corporate learning folks among us. That thread kicked off with an exercise in scenario planning. Hans and Willem did a wonderful job distilling 4 possible future learning worlds, and the scenarios were used all the way through the closing conversation of the business track. Curious what the 4 scenarios are, or what an exercise in scenario planning is actually good for? Check out the site learningscenarios.org. I'll chip in my part in a later post. I did spend most if not all of my time in the Business Educa track this year. It's so nice to have a clear focus on corporate, while at the same time not letting go of the cross-fertilization (don't picture it literally) between corporate, non-profit and education sectors.
The Dutch are nice people, but too much is too much as a Belgian would say. They were the number one cohort. The picture below is actually a nice Dutch guy, with his 3 toys. That's another impression of OEB: the area of the tablet has begun! The network capacity was increased by a factor 2.5 compared to the year before, but was still lacking at times (somehow I managed to lose some of my notes as the Evernote sync has not completed before I changed them...). Well, as the picture suggests the demand for network is now times 3 as we all carry multiple devices with us. Aren't all these toys nice?
The chairman of the opening plenary was a nice man. Talal Abu-Ghazaleh repeated his kick-ass opening joke of last year, and provoked the audience to stop using words as 'developing', 'teach' or 'arab spring'. While I did not agree with most/any of his suggestions, I appreciate a dissident voice in an otherwise fully anglosaxon panel. Maybe it was his way to keep us silent during the panel discussions. The panel itself did not live up to its expectations I'm sad to report. But then again, expectations were very high for speakers such as the author of 'Sex, bombs and burgers', or Dance-Your-PhD star John Bohannon. To summarize them all in one line : Peter Nowak is a fan of the dark side of people because it is the side the creates many innovations, John Bahonnon is stupid without Google and Wikipedia, and Jef Borden told us that fat people tend to cluster together in social networks. The opening did not provide any thought provoking insights that became the talk of the conference, and Mr Nice "it-is-not-a-world-crisis-it-is-a-western-crisis" did allow the plenary to go well over time so the schedule was f*cked up for the rest of the day causing let's say my session on learning impact to be cut by 30 min. But moving on... I have to be a nice guy.
The star of the plenary in my nice opinion is Mr Bohannon. He has nice chest hair, by the way. I could tell because he did not button up completely for the plenary - but I digress. He did not do a stellar show like in the video above on TedxBrussels, but he did make us all think about the trustworthiness of Wikipedia and our digital imprints and the need for critical reflection skills. He browsed the net for the dirt on all other panelists, and shared that openly with us. That may not be nice, but it was very insightful as well as entertaining. Mr Bohannon was sitting a few seats in front of my on the plane back to Brussels, him and his nice chest hair and everything.
At some times, the conference felt like Groundhog day. It is nice if you can time travel like that and think 'have I not been to this conference before?'. At the one hand, we are all searching for the next big thing in learning land and want inspiration to push us beyond the borders of our imagination. At the other hand, we whine that we are still struggling to implement the next big things of 10 years ago. What's wrong with this picture? It can't be us, can it? We're just too nice...
There are next new things actually, but you have to look for them. I was for example really impressed by something the folks at the TechSmith booth would only show when you asked for it really really nice: their Coach's Eye iphone app. In my nice and occasionally humble opinion, it might become the killer elearning app we predicted five years ago but were unable to create ourselves. In essence it is an app to provide feedback. And boy, can we all do with quality feedback! In this version, it is more intended for sports, but if in next iterations of the app they record voice it can be used to give feedback on presentations, difficult conversations, negotiation skills, etc... Now that's a nice app!
To get an actual review of the content of the sessions, you may want to read through the blog posts below. That's another thing I observed this year: there are some really really rapid (and also nice) bloggers out there. I had barely lifted my nice *ss of my seat or their review was online!
- Opening Plenary (by Hans de Zwart)
- Ignite session (same author)
- Performance cultures (still the same guy)
- Curation session (don't even ask); This was an excellent session that I half-attended, and the links are also on symbaloo.com and scoop.it. Also Moocha thinks curation is the top take-away from this conference.
- Reflections on OEB11 (Wilfred Rubens - in Dutch, this might be a good opportunity to see how Google Translate has evolved since you last tried it)
- Learning scenarios workshop and recap (Kasper Spiro)
- Visual Notes (Saurau)
Did I mention OEB 2011 was nice?
And to make up for the fact I blogged very late about it, I'll be the first to write a review on OEB 2012. You can read it here.
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