Impressions of Learning Technologies in London

Three weeks ago, I walked the exhibition floor of the joint conferences Learning Technologies and Learning and Skills in London. I was there mainly to chat up with some people I hadn't seen in a long time, and to get some expert advice on our upcoming MOOC. Here are some impressions of the exhibition.

Exchanging thoughts with Chris Patton. He organises a MOOC on healthinformaticsforum.com and uses the social network site Ning for that. We are still in the discovery phase of our LeaderMOOC project. Ning might be a thought. Or maybe not.

Dang, just now that I got fantastic, it's not good enough anymore...

If I was an HR buyer visiting this exhibition, I'd want my managers selected and trained in three hours. Maybe less.

The free vendor talks get really crowded and noisy. This guy got his hands on two voting systems. Doesn't that screw up the democratic principles?

I really liked the booklet on learning impact on this stand. What you are seeing is the live poll on 'happy sheets'. If we don't think much of them, why are we still (only) using them as impact indicator? What's wrong with us? I can't find the 'little book of impact' online for you to download, so I won't bother to tell you who made it.

The guy in this booth was really looking like I should't be laughing out loud. But I couldn't help myself. I guess the competition played a trick on him in the morning hours before opening... 

Liked this Storyline tool. Of course, it comes at a price. Nice demo. Yes, it can do everything. Can it clean my house? No. But it does run on an iPad.

I liked this example of a learning path. (It was on an iPad.) You can also call it journey. Or development road. Or adventure. Just call it something that is not an event, and don't use the C word.

On the left is a former guest blogger of this blog, Amir. Mr Tin Can himself on the right. (The government calls him Tim Martin.) I have been using their excellent Scorm Cloud and before that Scorm Test Track a lot. This was another exchange session with a conference speaker arranged by Towards Maturity. I learned that v 1.0 of the much awaited Tin Can API will probably released in April. A lot of vendors are already supporting it, and more on the way. Tin Can (aka experience API) will be open and expandable. It is the successor of both SCORM and AICC. It allows learning to break free from the LMS. It still doesn't clean the house. But it runs on an iPad (eg via Tappestry).

Last vendor booth I visited: they have a 'people' centric approach to learning instead of a content approach. Their system matches you with other experts and people wanting to get better at X. With all the systems out there, I find this simple question actually very helpful to select one : is the developmental experience going to be mainly content driven, or will it be mainly people driven? Depending on the answer (hint: you can't say both because the question contains the word 'mainly') go for an LMS or a social platform.
They also had an iPad. Probably one of the many you could win.

I'd put a picture up from Laura from Toward Maturity, but she is very shy. You can read about the other exchange sessions with conference speakers they did here. I'm showing you a picture of the infographic they made from their latest industry benchmark study.

You'll also be happy to know that Clive is alive and well and declared 2013 as the year of the blend.

And finally- literally above the sneaky tricks of the vendors- Hans had interesting conversations and blogged about them here.

Just in case you are actually interested in what the speakers had to say on the conference, check out the slides and videos on the annotag Learning Technologies page. Here's a quote from the 'beyond the obvious' talk from Gerd Leonhard: "Quite possibly, mobile means the end of learning monopolies (for institutions) and the end of 'I don't know' (for users)." I bet you need an iPad for that.