DevLearn 08 is Great!
I’m having a wonderful time at DevLearn 2008 this week! There is so much information to share that my hardest task is to figure out what to write about first. The organization of information, and the challenge of helping people to make sense of it, seems to be one of the major themes I’m hearing from this year’s conference.
Tony Karrer’s session on Work Literacy mentioned the impact of information overload – which can reduce an individual’s IQ by 10 points, and have the same impact on mental focus as missing an entire night of sleep. Unfortunately, information overload isn’t going anywhere anytime soon in a world where Google has over a trillion pages indexed. So our job as learning professionals is to help learners to find the information they need.
Notice I did not say to provide the information for them. Another key theme is the idea that learning 2.0 is about facilitating access to information, rather than feeding specific content to the learners. Feeding specific content is learning 1.0 – and we all know that there is a place for that in the world.
The Ruth Clark session I attended was all about making learning 1.0 more effective, contrasting the research that’s been done in the field with the assumptions learning professionals hold. For example, “interactivity” in the form of discussion, is not measurably more effective than lecture for delivering specific content. Another study found that still images plus text are more effective for delivering content about how something works than animations plus narration. This one makes me sad – but I have a sneaking suspicion that it will make the multimedia developers I work with less sad.
Lots of people at the conference are putting summaries and comments out on the web. Check some out here, and here. The Twitter feed from DevLearn is a great place to find blog posts and other conference information.
More soon…
Tags: Conference, DevLearn, Learning 2.0, Learning Research
November 13th, 2008 at 1:04 pm
Somehow I have a feeling that some of this will find its way into our panel discussion at UIndy next week. Sounds like a terrific conference.
November 29th, 2008 at 6:23 am
Hello webmaster I like your post “DevLearn 08 is Great!” so well that I like to ask you whether I should translate into German and linking back. Answer welcome. Greetings Schlauchboot