Devlearn is an annual gathering of folks who are focused on learning and in particular those who are focused on e-learning. As it does every year, this year’s conference brought together some of the best thinkers in learning, education, simulation, and related fields. This was the year of social media and how to apply various social tools to learning. For example, can Twitter be an effective way to help people learn the bare essentials or can it be used more effectively to remind a person of something they have already learned?
Andrew McAfee is a Fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center and is deeply involved in Enterprise 2.0. Andrew gave the opening keynote and talked through the themes in his new book, Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for Your Organization’s Toughest Challenges.
Andrew defined the state of the art of Enterprise 2.0 under 6 major headings: 1. Altruism: People want to help each other, 2. Process: There’s no one best way to do things — the era of best practices is dying, 3. Innovation: Innocentive is an example of a site where many apply themselves to your one problem, 4. Intelligence: Harness the collective. The wisdom of crowds leads to effective solutions, 5. Benefits: Enterprise 2.0 gives you the opportunity to “narrate your work” to the extent that you can all of a sudden demonstrate your expertise, 6. Impact: Its a bad idea to sit out the Web 2.0 phenomenon.
For those of you who want more details or want to download presentations, the DevLean website has the Twitter stream, transcripts and presentations from the event, so take a look a discover what trends seem to be gaining traction.
The video below is a chat with Jay Cross, author of several books on Informal Learning and a long time thought leader to the learning world. These are his impressions of the conference.
