Want to Learn Something at #ASTD2014? Attend a Forum Session

It is that time of year again.   Learning & Development professionals from all corners of the globe make their annual migration to attend the ASTD International Conference & Exposition (aka ICE; aka #ASTD2014).  This year's event is in Washington DC.   It offers a great line up of key note speakers,  hundreds of concurrent sessions to choose from, and more learning vendors assembled in one place than you can ever possibly want to see.

Like many of my industry colleagues, I'm looking forward to exhausting myself trying to get as much out of the event as I possibly can. (Here are my key takeaways from last year's conference.)   For many of us, that means spending a lot of time in rooms that have rows of chairs facing a dais with a jovial speaker presenting information using a PowerPoint presentation on a giant screen.  It is ironic, that this is the primary format for session delivery in a conference that is focused on learning.  Granted, this is a conference, not a learning event per se, but we do all go there to learn something.

If you are looking for a break from the rows of chairs, and you want to really learn something.  Check out one of the four sessions being hosted by the ASTD Forum.   The Forum is  a consortium of senior learning professionals from about 50+ member companies who connect to collaborate and share best practices on learning.   I'm in my third year of membership and it has been richly rewarding for my company and for me personally.

The Forum Sessions at ICE offer a true learning experience.  When you walk into the room, you will notice the difference immediately.  The Forum sessions are set up with round tables, not rows of chairs.  There is interaction and engagement between the participants and with the facilitators.  You'll leave with tangible takeaways.

Here are the topics that will be covered in this year's Forum sessions.  Each one is delivered in a unique format:

1. Monday, 1 PM - Selling Learning's Value Proposition (format: Whiteboarding with Visual Icons)
2. Monday, 3 PM - Building a Culture that Supports Learning Innovation in Your Organization (format: Force Field Analysis)
3. Tuesday, 10 AM - Onboarding - Practices that Get Results! (format: Zing Rounds with 4 member companies)
4. Tuesday, 1:30 PM - Creating a Global Mindset as a Leadership Competency (format: Creative Matrix)

They are all being held in room 101, so please come by and check one out. But you better get there early. Like all good learning events, we limit group size to ensure participants can maximize their learning experience.

Five Themes Heard Loudly and Clearly at #ASTD2013

This week was the learning industry’s premiere event:  The ASTD International Conference and Exposition (aka ICE) in Dallas.   Estimated attendance was upwards of 9000 learning geeks from over 70 countries.  I was proud to be among them.

At an event this large, it is impossible to experience it all.  It is like visiting the Louvre or the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There is just too much to see and do.  The best way to approach it is to focus on a theme or a track, and create your own personal conference experience.  Two colleagues from my company attended the conference this year along with me.  One of them followed the Sales Enablement track and the other followed the Measurement, Evaluation and ROI track.  My approach was different.  Our company is a member of the ASTD Forum (a benchmarking group of about 50 companies that help each other out on workplace learning issues and share best practices).   The Forum members put on a series of workshops at ICE each year.  This year we offered four sessions.  I volunteered to co-facilitate one of them and I decided to attend the other three to support my colleagues during their facilitation.   It made for a great experience but it limited the number of sessions outside of the Forum offerings that I could attend.

Despite not getting around as much as I have at previous conferences, several themes reached me through the sessions I did attend, through the twitterverse, and through casual conversations with other conference goers in the expo, at lunch, and during my favorite event: the ice cream social!

Here are five themes I heard repeatedly during my conference experience:

Passion – Sir Ken Robinson kicked of the passion craze during his keynote address on Monday morning.  In discussing his new book, Finding Your Element, he reminded us all that we are happiest and most successful in our careers when we are able to perform work that marries up our aptitudes with our passions.   This seemingly simple point, made quite an impact.  It was cited during several other sessions during the week and was often part of the conversation in between sessions.

Millennials – It was fascinating to me to see how many times the millennial generation was discussed during this conference.  But what truly surprised me was the way it was discussed: “Millenials are coming!”  “They are going to be in leadership positions!”   “We must prepare!”  It was as if a plague or a hostile army was descending on us.   In my humble opinion, we were going a little overboard on this one.  Yes, every generation has different life experiences that shape their expectations, but isn’t that just part of diversity?  Embrace it and let it enrich us.   Let’s focus more on what we can learn from them and less about how they might react to “old school training approaches” that we should be retiring anyway.

Brain Science – I haven’t heard this much talk about the brain since the educational psychology courses I attended in graduate school.   But it is a welcome line of conversation.   Brain research is about memory and recall.  It confirms all of the things we know we should be doing to enable effective learning:  get people’s attention, stimulate their thinking, appeal to their emotions, and give them time to digest and reflect on what they have learned.   The latest research is being presented in easily digestible formats.   That is good news.  It gives us something to work with when we are trying to convince our business partners why we are advocating short bursts of learning spaced out over time instead of cramming everything into a three-day event.

Mobile as Performance Support - As it was with last year’s conference, Mobile Learning was a very hot topic.  But whereas last year’s discussion centered on how to get mobile learning off the ground, this year’s theme was how to do it right: getting mobile learning into the workflow and using it for just-in-time performance support.  Shame on anyone who still thinks they might be able to take an existing e-learning course and reconfigure it for a mobile device.   That is not the way to go.

Curation – As the learning industry embraces mobile, social, and self-managed learning as opportunities, we find ourselves needing to play a new role in relation to our learners: content curator.  With the overwhelming amount of information our learners have at their disposal, and the wide variety of sources from which to get that information, we can help them by sorting it out in ways that makes it easier for them to get their hands on content that will be most useful to them.  This year the ASTD published a conference backchannel resource page.   And of course, David Kelly, who has become one of the most influential leaders on this topic, posts his own curated resources from the conference.

Thoughts on ASTD ICE 2012 (#ASTD2012)

This week I attended ASTD’s International Conference andExpo (ICE) at the Colorado Convention Center in Denver, CO.  It has been three or four years since I last attended ICE (it was in Atlanta that year).   It is such a big event; it is just too overwhelming to attend every year.  But I find it valuable to go every couple of years.   The snapshots over time give you a better sense of what is really progressing and changing in the learning industry.

Here are some random thoughts and reactions that stuck with me from this year’s conference:

The Learning & Development profession is strong and growing – there were about 10,000 attendees at this year’s conference.  The Wells Fargo Theater started filling up well before ASTD President Tony Bingham took to the stage to welcome everyone, and they were still coming in while Jim Collins was delivering his excellent and inspiring keynote presentation.

The Learning & Development profession is becoming well…more professional – I spoke to many people who had or were completing advanced degrees in Adult Education, Instructional Systems or the like.  Many academic institutions were represented at the expo enticing conference attendees to explore their programs. There was also a good showing of people who have obtained the relatively new CPLP credential.

This conference is international with a capital “I” – my guesstimate is that about 20% of the attendees were from outside the US.  Kudos to ASTD for setting up the “Global Village” networking room which was often packed during the session breaks.

Everyone’s conference experience is unique – with somewhere between 350-400 sessions to choose from, everyone has the ability to create their own conference-within-a-conference based on their own needs and interests.  I spent most of my time in sessions about mobile and social learning.

Technology rules – there was a notable difference in technology usage from my last conference experience in Atlanta.  Everyone had mobile devices, many people tablets, and ASTD provided a great app for the event that allowed you plan your day, read speaker’s bios, grab presentation materials, complete evaluations, take notes, and follow the twitter stream (#ASTD2012).

Networking rules – it was great to meet some of my twitter connections in person for the first time.  It was also create connecting with fellow members of the ASTD Forum, and to meet and make new contacts.

Since this is my blog, here are some “Mike Awards” that I’d like to bestow related to the conference:

Most practical session award – Jane Bozarth (@JaneBozarth):  Social Media for Trainers.  Jane did a great job covering many ways to easily incorporate social media tools in training.

Sleeper session award – Joe Saturnino:  Implementing Mobile Learning Applications.   I didn’t know Joe or what to expect going into this session so I was pleasantly surprised. He went through the what, why and how of mobile learning and provided great ideas on things that are easily doable.

The best session I did not attend award – Allison Rossett (@arossett) and Frank Nguyen: The Yin and Yang of Informal and Formal Learning.   I had the opportunity to read the cases and try out their evaluation tool prior to this session so I did not attend, but I know it was a good one.  Allison is always informative and entertaining.

Most amazing content sharing award – David Kelly (@LnDDave): for curating and creating this treasure trove of conference resources.

The oddest surprise award – goes to the Colorado Convention Center escalator that goes to and from the expo floor.  It laughs at you while you ride it.  No, really.