My #DevLearn conference insights – Day 1

Last updated on November 5th, 2019 at 09:28 am

The first keynote – Sophia the robot

The conference began with the initial keynote done by Sophia the robot. Honestly I would say that this keynote was not up to the standard of what I have come to expect of a DevLearn keynote. I was a little disappointed. I couldn’t help but think that this was just a robot body projecting the opinions of the engineers that developed it. It seems more like a gimmick than anything else. Perhaps I’m a little cynical.

I did hear a suggestion from someone, not sure who, that it would have been nice to have a Q&A with the engineers – to help really understand how much of Sophia is AI and how much is preprogrammed. They did admit that the keynote was prepared in advance (now people do that too) as was most of the Q&A. There were a few questions that were asked there were not prepped and I was under impressed with the response.

One of the questions that was asked in the Q&A was about the robots preferred gender pronoun. The robot has been given a female name and is generally referred to as ‘she’, which then begged the question, why is the robot a she? My response to that is that the robot is a ‘servant’ and that aligns culturally with female gender. A less cynical answer might be that Sophia is a ‘social’ robot and in our cultural women are seen as being more social than men. Further to the gender question, my question was, why is Sophia white?

Using storytelling strategies to write compelling scenarios

The presenter for the session, Hadiya Nuriddin, did a great job. Her presentation was a story in and of itself. Her presentation has encouraged me to check out her book, StoryTraining: Selecting and shaping stories that connect.

The biggest takeaway I had was the use of the story spine – a great tool to helping write scenarios for eLearning. The spine goes like this:

Next time I’m writing something for my online class based upon my experience, I’m going to try using this technique. She also mentioned that the story spine is something that could be used to frame interviews for subject matter experts.

Connected Learning: How to harness the power of social, data, & networks

The next session I attended was a lunchtime session on connected learning presented by Rose Benedicks. This was a vendor presentation based upon an free eBook they are offering available at: https://leolearning.com/resources/connected-learning-how-to-harness-the-power-of-social-data-and-networks/

The one thing I learned at this session was a new term – LXP – Learning Experience Platform. It is the fancy new name for LMS within sectors that are not formal education. The argument is that “everyone hates their LMS” and the LMS space is super crowded right now, so some vendors have started rebranding themselves as Learning Experience Platforms rather than LMSs.

Phaser 3: A free authoring tool for gamified eLearning

I started out in this session but didn’t last long – largely because it had already been a long day and I was tired. The presenters highlighted that Phaser 3 is a gaming platform, not an eLearning platform. That being said, I could see how combing it with H5P and WordPress would give you a pretty decent set for free tools for developing cool things.

One challenge that I have is the focus on gaming as gamification and losing the pedagogy in it. Also, the confusion between games and gamification or serious games (which I’ll talk to more in my next blog post). Don’t get me wrong, in this case the presenters did a really good job highlighting that Phaser 3 is a game building platform, not an eLearning one. For what it was, I think it was a good presentation – just not what I was looking for.

Video Critique: The good, the bad, and the ugly

This was actually a Tuesday night session that was put on for anyone arriving at the conference early. It was hosted by the DevLearn staff – and was pretty entertaining. The session involved showing a bunch of training videos and critiquing them. The videos were from various times and various countries.

If you want to be entertained, take a look at the playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLy1fKNjijAjzUw_jcHvY4_TIaWXfIUcIg

As I write this, I’ve had a great idea. I think I’m going to select a few of these to use as a discussion around the use of video in learning for the course I teach called “Project in multimedia”. There is a module on the use of video, and I think this type of discussion – maybe done using VoiceThread so it can be done asynchronously – would be both a lot of fun and educational at the same time.

Missed session on video

There was one session that I missed because I was just too tired to keep going – and that was a session title Film School for Learning Professionals by Jonathan Halls. Unfortunately, I’m not seeing any info on his presentation on the eLearning Guild website – but I am seeing the presentations he has done in the past. It looks like he has some great resources on his website and shared on the eLearning Guild’s site from previous conferences. I’ll need too look more into those when I’m creating course material for next semester and summer.

Impacts on my teaching and practice

After the first official day in the conference, I had a few key things that will influence how I teach and how I design instruction. Specifically:

• Using the story spine when writing stories for my training – and interviewing SMEs. Further, I’m going to read Hadiya Nuriddin‘s book on storytelling to see if there are any resources I can bring in to my Designing your professional presence course this summer
• Introducing my students to the term LXP when looking at learning management systems in my online learning design course
• Using the Good, Bad, Ugly playlist as a way to engage students in critiquing training videos
• Exploring Jonathan Hall’s resources on how to create better video for training

Further, one thing that I learned that doesn’t directly follow my practice right now, but might in the future: Introducing students to Phaser 3. I also noticed that no one mentioned H5P at the conference and might be an interesting thing to explore for future conferences.