e-Learning Leadership Blog

2011 ASTD TechKnowledge Conference

by Ethan Edwards, chief instructional strategist

This is a week of preparation and anticipation. Next week I’ll be travelling to San Jose for ASTD’s TechKnowlege Conference and Expo.  I always look forward to this annual gathering of e-learning professionals and the opportunity it provides for making direct contact with colleagues and making new acquaintances.

Carla Torgerson, an Allen Interactions instructional designer and teacher colleague, and I will be conducting the pre-conference e-learning certificate sessions on Monday and Tuesday.  We teach these classes, the core design class and the advanced class, regularly throughout the year, but there’s always a special feeling of excitement when they are coupled with the full conference proceedings.  It’s a great way to kick off the week by really exploring and mastering the unique contributions technology can make to creating powerful learning opportunities.

I’ve just begun looking at the full conference program to decide which sessions I’ll attend.  It’s funny how often I experience the same thing:  I pick out a few sessions that seem relevant and interesting, but then for unexpected reasons, may not get to attend them, and instead find myself ducking into a seemingly unrelated session on a topic I’ve not really heard of.  It often is in those surprise sessions that some of the most memorable insights arise.

As designers and developers of e-learning, I think it’s important to embrace the unexpected.  For me, the source of inspiration for the best online examples I’ve come across or helped design has rarely come from the formal instructional design tradition.  Instead, the kernel of an idea for interactivity usually grows from an insight into the work environment, a particularly astute assessment of contextual elements involved in a task, an unexpected connection with some other successful learning piece or unrelated media, or focused-yet-open brain storming. 

Of course, you can’t force a good idea to appear on demand, but approaching the design process as an open, exploratory process to which all of your experiences are related creates a setting in which memorable and meaningful interactions arise quite as a matter of course.  (To be clear, I’m not advocating an abandonment or instructional design principles.  It is important to thoroughly examine and bolster any interaction you create with solid instructional justification of the design.)

So I hope to see many of you at Technknowledge next week.  Go with an open mind, look for things you didn’t even know existed, search for the “powerful” instead of the “adequate,” attend a session that only seems partially related to your work but sounds fascinating anyway.

[And on a purely selfish note, I get great pleasure from meeting readers of this blog or other pieces of my writing.  It energizes me to make a personal connection with people engaged in designing and developing similar interactive pieces, so I encourage you to attend my speaking session on Thursday and be sure to say “Hello” or just stop by the Allen Interactions booth 400 in the Expo Hall.]

Make sure to stop by our website if you still need a free expo pass!