eLearning DevCon Day 3

Day three at eLearning DevCon was a half day and it seemed most people saved attending the best sessions for last- at least if one counts the attendance of these sessions as a reflection of their being 'the best'. As with the other sessions, once the presentations are posted, I'll provide some more in depth comment on each one. I haven't yet latched on to live blogging as Brent was doing during the conference. (note: I noticed a few others live blogging and I will attempt to link to their blogs as soon as I discover them.)

Now for today's sessions:

• Podcasting: A New Learning Distribution Channel (Debbie Richards)- Debbie provided a very useful session on how to produce and publish podcasts. This will be one worth writing on more. Now that Alltel has launched a mobile phone podcasting BREW client, I feel the trend toward podLearning will explode soon. The question is what should we name it? podLearning, eduCasting, eduPodcasting, castLearn, mobileCastEdu? Like everything else with e-learning, I'm sure the buzzwords will change on a weekly basis.
• Learning 2.0, The Revolution has begun! (Brent Schlenker)- Another conference shortened by technical difficulties, but still very informative. We all know Web2.0, well Learning 2.0 is basically what was coined as asynchronous learning last year. The possibility of using blogs and wikis to teach is interesting, but, even with my support of eduChaos, I still worry that at some point, chaos must have a level of control. One only has to look at how conspiracy theories have become 'common knowledge' (think of all the Halliburton/ War for Oil conspiracy bull shit). One can expect that the community would police itself and it would all balance itself out in the end, but we can simply look at John Conyers recent impeachment proposal to realize how the conspiracy fiction is a self feeding monster (OK, I'll shut up with the politic here and leave that for Abaraxas.)
• Large Organization Round Table (Brian Miller)- A very informal group discussion on some of the issues that currently face large corporations in relation to e-learning. Sadly, with all my searching, I am having problems finding others with similar issues or have solved the problem of creating a unified, on demand, help agent. Most of the people I've talked with either have already gone with RoboHelp or are ten steps behind where we are.
• Flash Components: Guru Results with Minimal Effort (Karessa Torgerson)- Potentially a good session, but for some reason, this session seemed to not flow well. Karessa seemed to know her topic from a technical end, but, like many others, this session would be well served to have been offered with more time or multiple sessions with actual hands-on activity.
• Award Winning Instructional Design (Kevin Kruse)- The e-Learning Guru once again brings some logic and common sense to close the session with real world steps to creating quality e-learning. The overall outline of his plan is common for most designers and is similar to the FKA model we use.