Some first thoughts from Berlin after returning to the UK after some weeks away.

I like this conference. I've been a few times and I do think it's the best conference of its kind. The variety and the high quality of the conference sessions and the  participants - including the visitors and the exhibitors.

This year was a little different though; Emerald took a stand as part of the larger BILD (British Institute of Learning) pavillion. No strangers to conferences this was however Emerald's first time exhibiting at Educa.  The BILD pavillion was shared with BPP Media, Video Arts, Caspian eLearning and the BILD itself.

The conference, from the 28th to the 30th, is Europes premier technology enabled learning, training and development conference and is in its 13th year.

The delegate and exhibitors list will be emailed to all in the coming weeks but I reckon there were well over 1000 delegates, with a hundred or so exhibitors and a similar number of papers presented.

Themes emerging this year - social media tools for learning certainly featured heavily and sessions discussing this development captured my attention the most. I had to choose carefully this year since we had a stand and a colleague, Sita, to watch over!

Although I'm sure many of the sessions that I missed were of the usual high quality I also have the nagging feeling that much of it would not have been particularly new. I think the time I was required to spend in the stand actually give me the chance to talk to more people than if I had circulated around the sessions. This was a little unexpected I have to admit. This week I have had some great converations with real specialists and delegates genuinely interested in what we had to offer and to say.

InTouch recieved some great press (with one visitor declaring it the best thing in the whole conference!!). I was so pleased to be able to talk about this to experts and learning professionals; more so to see such a good reaction. A bit thrilled in fact.

It's worth remembering that this is the first time we have taken inTouch out to a wider audience. Personally I found the response encouraging and I think Sita learned an awful lot and it will stand us in good stead for the future.

Of course we also talked about EMF and EMX; one or two good prospects for EMF in particular - Sita and Stephanie will follow up on those. 

A special word of thanks to UK Trade and Investment (UKTI). They were always there to support the British exhibitors and I was pleased to have the chance the present to a collection of trade officers from UK embassies they assembled from around Europe. I think this too was a good chance to raise awareness of Emerald but this time in the corporate sector. We'll see if anything comes of it.

Returning to the sessions and the conference themes I'm left with the feeling that a real and genuine idealogical(?) difference in how organisations may deal with issues of learning and development is emerging; perhaps it's always been there, I mean it's not as if I deal with learning and development issues on a day to basis at Emerald.

Perhaps it's not an idealogical split but perhaps simpler than that; just a desire to return to simpler means of learning? The InTouch platform, which is basicallya customised Elgg system is one example of a simple technology that returns control to the user. It's simple and inexpensive and lacks many of the features found in the expensive, technology rich software solutions (which I won't mention here) but contains more valuable opportunities for learning and personal development I believe. Classic Innovators Dillema - a theme I've blogged about here before. See Tony Karrer for more on this. But when combined with some of ideas I'm reading about from say Jay Cross on informal learning, and Peter Isackons work on Communities as a means of learning I'm left with the singular notion that simpler technology and old fashioned ideas of learning (guilds/communities/networks/people) is an idea whose time has returned with the development of cheap and ubiquitous net access and the read/write web.

I'm now looking forward to developing some more of these conversation over the coming weeks and months. 

Saw this from Tony karrer and it appears to confirm much of my own thinking on where things are headed in the LMS/Enterprise learning space.

Communities / Social Networking and LMS Merger

I've not seen a lot about Mzinga in the eLearning world, but it represents something pretty interesting. Mzinga is a merger of KnowledgePlanet (an LMS provider and also the maker of the eLearning simulation tool - Firefly) and Shared Insights - a community / business social networking software company.

From what I can gather from the press releases and based on who's in charge of the combined company, it appears that KnowledgePlanet is somewhat the loser. The top execs at Mzinga are not the top execs from KnowledgePlanet. It makes me wonder what this says about the LMS and tools market. We are beginning to see dominance by a few bigger vendors and if you can't be one of them, then it's tough sledding.

The other interesting thing here is that it seems like LMS vendors really are moving away from being LMS vendors. Previously, I talked about how they are now referring to themselves in terms of talent management and workforce productivity. There have also been moves to become focused on a niche such as an industry or function or certification.

This merger points to another direction - combination of LMS capability + community / social networking. I'm not sure I quite get what that means yet. I wonder if mzinga does? The description of their offerings seem still mostly separate (communities software and the KP learning platform). Also, if you go to the solutions page, it doesn't mention Firefly. And even the name of the page - Community Solutions - suggests that the LMS isn't all that important.

Luckily David Wilkins - who I've known for quite a few years - has helped me try to understand. It sounds a lot like an LMS with integrated communities. But like Q2Learning, they aim to provide visibility into community activities. This is something that I think makes sense, especially when trying to get communities going. David helps to paint a bit of a picture:

    ...think certification training with links to discussion forums or a Wiki or relevant files in a shared file repository...

He also pointed me to a Gartner quote:

    Enterprise social software will be the biggest new workplace technology success story of this decade.

This certainly helps us understand why you might want to have someone like KP's sales and marketing to help you sell community software into the enterprise.

via eLearning Technology

Online Educa Keynote 

Two of the first day’s keynote speakers stirred people’s feelings.

When he was chief scientist for NIIT, Sugata Mitra walked to work through a slum just outside the NIIT campus. He asked colleagues what they thought of the children just over the wall in the slum. His colleagues said they wished the children didn’t exist. Not that they wanted to do away with them: no one should live in such circumstances. Sugata then asked the slum children what they thought of the people strolling the NIIT campus. They replied, “Nothing.” They did have a few questions: Why to they all dress alike? Why are they always on the phone? From this evolved the “Hole in the Wall” Project.

Dr. Mitra put a PC with touchpad in a hole in a wall in the slums. Unattended. A hidden video camera recorded what happened. In a matter of minutes, a curious child had discovered how to browse the web. Soon she was teaching six-year olds the secret. At another location, a thirteen-year old learned to browse in eight minutes; by the end of the day, seventy children were browsing.

Next, Dr. Mitra lodged a PC in a wall in a community where no one had ever spoken English. Several weeks later, he returned to find that the children had learned anatomy. How had they accomplished this? To figure out the lessons, they taught themselves English. Frequently, one child would operate the PC in front of a dozen spectators giving instructions. Half the instructions were wrong, but it did not matter; everyone learned nonetheless.

Dr. Mitra took a PC to a remote Tamil village. He challenged the children to learn biotech. When he returned, the children said the subject was too difficult. Then an eight-year old girl said that of course they knew that DNA was the cause of genetic disease.

A hole in the wall costs 3 cents per child per day. The children learn irrespective of who they are. None of this takes place in school.

At the Educa party the next evening, Sugata told me his next experiment would assess whether children can learn enough independently to pass school examinations. My friend Peter asked about how this might work in other cultures, only to find that Sugata had already demonstrated that the Hole in the Wall works in Africa.

I plan to keep in touch with Sugata. Children teaching themselves spontaneously is as informal as it gets. How well would extreme informal learning work with people whose minds have already been polluted with schooling?