As I've done in the past here at Element K Blog (see the Industry Events for many conference report postings), I wanted to provide some reflections on the conference I participated in recently. The Society for Applied Learning Technology (SALT) held their "Interactive Technologies Conference" in Washington DC Aug. 19-21 (PDF of their program). I had never been to a SALT event before, so it was great to finally participate in one.
As I mentioned in an earlier posting regarding the CSTD Symposium held in Halifax in May, there are some definite benefits to attending smaller conferences: many are aspects that boil down to quality over quantity, ranging from the program itself to the lack of feelings of "getting lost in the crowd" and the ability to have deeper conversations with people. That said, the program at this conference provided ample choices for sessions to attend. What I really found helpful was how the sessions were organized into tracks, and then each session in each track was held in the same room throughout the day. This provided continuity that I sometimes find lacking at other industry events.
The tracks included at this conference were representative of both traditional learning technology topics and the common "hot topics" (the top four in the list below) that I've noted in earlier blog postings:
- Gaming and Simulation (18 sessions)
- Web 2.0 (14 sessions)
- Mobile Learning (7 sessions)
- Virtual Worlds (7 sessions)
- Compliance (6 sessions)
- Design (10 sessions)
- E-Learning (10 sessions)
- Training (11 sessions)
- Knowledge Management (4 sessions)
My own presentation was again on "Blending Web 2.0 Technologies with Traditional Formal Learning" (It was a shortened version of what is available here as a pre-recorded Element K webinar.) I had a good audience of 50+ people, and I appreciated the follow-up conversations as well.
The attendees at this conference were more of a mix of L&D leaders from government, academia, and corporate than many of the other conferences I've participated in that were dominated by folks from the corporate world. So this mix definitely gave this conference a different flavor than what I've experienced in the past few years. I attended excellent presentations by people from or representing the U.S. Department of State, the U.S. Department of the Interior, NASA and NOAA, the U.S. Department of Labor, and others (including academia and corporate organizations, of course).
In addition, the keynote speaker was from the government sector as well, in that he is a member of the military getting ready to retire: Major General Vincent E. Boles. He gave a lively and interesting presentation of the massive training operations and challenges that the military has, and some innovative approaches they have taken to meet those challenges. In particular, he stressed one of their guiding principles as being that you can't train on everything, so you should train on a few tasks, but to standard, and do it well -- something I think applies to any large enterprise with broad training and learning needs but finite resources. He also emphasized the famous quotation which speaks to the importance of training and preparation: "The more you sweat in peace, the less you bleed in war." To the extent the analogy of business to war holds, I think this quote applies to the world of corporate L&D nicely.
The SALT organization is also moving ahead with the use of social media. During the event, they announced that they will soon have a LinkedIn presence, and I suspect a Facebook page won't be far behind. And if you are on Twitter and following various folks in the L&D world, you might have seen some of the many "tweets" that came out of this SALT event, tagged with the hashtag "#salt09”.
In summary, if you are considering attending a SALT event in the future—the next major conference is March 3-5 in Orlando, Florida—based on this one experience at least, I highly recommend them.
I'll wrap up this report with two other points about my trip to Washington DC:
- In addition to the SALT event, I also attended a meeting of the regional ASTD Metro-DC's chapter. This evening event had about 20 stations set up to demo various technologies that can be used in L&D contexts, and our station was focused on "wikis, blogs, and forums." Thanks to all who engaged with us in good conversations—your ASTD chapter certainly is a thriving group!
- My trip wasn't all business, as my wife came along and we spent four days doing lots of typical tourist activities in and around DC. Obviously, the Smithsonian museums we visited have changed a lot since I last visited them nearly 20 years ago. Most notably there are countless multimedia exhibits now, and many mixed exhibits as well. One interesting thought from a "learning" perspective occurred to me though: the most interesting exhibits, now more than ever, are those that revolve around unique (or nearly unique) physical artifacts. Why? Because of the Internet, and especially resources like Wikipedia, so much general information is now at our fingertips. While providing some such information about important events, people, etc., is helpful in a museum, having entire exhibits that provide only information that we can get easily online is no longer very valuable in my opinion. I suspect many museum-goers agree, and so I expect to see continuing changes in museums as a result.
— Thomas Stone (Tom_Stone@elementk.com)
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